Packing the Dragon
by noblsheep
Summary: Naomi meets Emily and Katie when backpacking through China in gap year, and end up traveling together. Pretty much everyone else mentioned or run into along the way. AU. Naomily.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: **Right. First fic ever, so any suggestions, criticism, thoughts, anything at all really, I'd love to hear them.

**Disclaimer:** Don't own the characters from Skins. Just borrowing them for a bit. I'll give them back when I'm done, promise.

* * *

**Chapter 1**

_Naomi_

It has seemed like such a good idea at the time. Just me and a backpack, three months in a strange country halfway around the world. Now it just seemed like sheer stupidity. I should've known that it would've been a disaster.

I scowled a final time at the old lady who insisted on selling me some weird looking tofu thingy in a wooden barrel instead of coffee, turned my heel and left. Fucking language barrier. I briefly pondered buying a plane ticket right back to London. Frowning again at the memory of the look on my mother's face when I'd told her I was going to fucking _China_, of all places, I decided suddenly and firmly that I was not going to back to familiarity. Expanding your horizons. Wasn't that what traveling was all about? Well, that and crabby old grannies talking loudly in Cantonese making you feel like a mong.

I sighed. Hong Kong, first stop in a three month trip. It was nothing like I'd imagined. It was supposed to be somewhat bustling, very modern. From photos, it looked glitzy and cliche, with all the comforting materialism and consumerism I'd grown up with. Now that I was actually here, I found it was, in fact, loud and messy, rather suffocating, with narrow streets and tiny shops wherever they could fit. The air was hot and humid, with moisture clinging to my skin and staying there stickily. People bellowed to each other from across streets and sat on the curb eating stuff I couldn't identify for the life of me. I gritted my teeth together and pulled out the fat notebook I'd filled in the weeks before I left. It'd seemed mostly overkill then - how hard could it be? Now, it looked foreign and insignificant.

I fished out the first of the various printed pages, a list named, simply, "Hong Kong". I sat down at a wobbly table in one of the tiny street corner tea shops and, after lots of pointing and waving, finally got a mug of tea and some exotic species of bread. I started crossing out (rather disgustedly) shopping malls, high end hotels, and amusement parks. I'd narrowed the list down to a manageable five to visit within the day and a half I would be there, and was marking them out on a map when my phone buzzed.

_How's HK? Jet lag? __Hotel? Emailed u on food, probly come in handy. HKers should speak __English,__ just don't try old people. See u tmr aftnoon. 2W_

I felt my face smile despite my crappy mood. I hastily finished my tea and stowed the map away, replying on my way back to the shitty hotel.

_Hotel crap. Need coffee. Kick the dog out. xN_

It was only 8 in the morning and I would never have gotten up this early except I could hardly sleep the last night. I'd slept nearly the whole flight, all 12 and a half hours of it, totally blowing my body clock into oblivion, and arrived in Hong Kong in the dead of night. Then I'd taken a bus, checked into a hotel and spent the whole night eyes wide open, alternating between watching mindnumbing videos online and watching the sun come up. (Thank fuck for free internet.) I yawned now, flopped onto bed and turned on my new (well, refurbed), extremely cheap laptop. Waiting for it to power on, I gulped down the can of coffee I'd gotten at the convenient store on the way back. Downloading the list of food, I scanned for stuff that looked edible, jotted them down on a blank page in the notebook, and snorted at the descriptions. Salty duck eggs mashed with pork and baked into pancake shaped things? Lotus roots steamed with Osmanthus flowers? Chicken feet preserved with small green chili peppers? I scrolled slowly to the bottom of the list.

It said in big, bold letters,

**Stop thinking about what it's made of and eat whatever smells good. You'll thank me.**

I stared at it for a second. What the fuck was that supposed to mean? I flipped shut my notebook and threw it in my bag, along with sunglasses, a jacket, a water bottle, and extra cash. Checked myself out in the mirror. Ripped jeans, converse hi tops, and a t-shirt that demanded, "I have problems! DO YOU?". Satisfied that I looked totally dashing if I do say so myself. Headed out. First stop, Repulse Bay Beach.

* * *

I sat on the sand, feeling like an utter idiot. That or an English tourist. Probably both. It wasn't the beach's fault, it was a rather nice beach. Children ran around babbling in some language or other, and ten feet behind me, a repulsive looking Middle Eastern couple were kissing and doing strange things with their arms. However, I somehow couldn't find a way to justify going halfway across the world to be sitting at the beach. I felt like I should be doing something, well, different. Something I hadn't done before. My thoughts wandered to a previous "family" outing (if you could call that a family), with a rough Irish accent saying, "What? It's just a cunting beach!" I sighed for the billionth time that day and was about to shuffle to my feet when my phone buzzed again.

_ok? bord alrd, C hi, pics?_

Ah, Effy. The girl could fit the history of this universe and several others into a text if she wanted to. She's probably asking if I'm OK, and stating that she's bored already, which is the understatement of the year because Effy was born bored. And Cook says hi. Cook, you know, big tosser, Effy's fuckbuddy, blessed with the ability to find pills in the Sahara. And she wants pictures soon. Where the fuck am I going to get her pictures?

With a bit of difficulty, I got to my feet, and started trudging up the sandy slope to the road. Reaching the pavement and relieved to have solid ground underfoot again, I pressed reply, and typed:

_Im good, actually. HK stuffy __tho__. Ur always bored, go party or sth. Say hi 2 Cook too, n try not 2 get into_

which was harshly interrupted when I suddenly walked into something small and soft, which said in a low, slightly husky, and quite indignant voice, "Hey!" My vision snapped up from the phone to be met with a shock of flaming hair, which spun around promptly to make my heart stop right where it stood. My eyes traveled down almost involuntarily - moist ruby lips _fuck me they're kissable_, checkered blouse, plain black skirt, rather nice legs, worn black trainers, back up, the same nice legs, half a dozen rings on her fingers, hair so red it made my eyes water, and finally porcelain skin and large brown eyes that oddly reminded me of a puppy. A pissed off puppy that was just walked into by a twat too busy texting to look where she was going.

"S-sorry," I stammered, when I suddenly realized that this was normally expected under these conditions.

My eyes met with hers, and I felt exactly like I was drowning in a warm pool. My mind grasped for a way to describe the experience, and could only think back to when I was five years old, and devouring the largest piece of chocolate I had seen in my short life because my mother wasn't looking. Let's just say it had been more than worth the trouble I had gotten into afterward.

And suddenly the moment was over, and that same voice was saying smugly, "Nice shirt."

"Explains a lot, doesn't it?" I heard myself replying. A detached part of my mind wondered loudly, _what are you doing? _I silenced it.

The girl smirked. "You're here on vacation all alone?"

"No, vacation is what middle-aged pen-pushers do for ten days a year. I'm traveling by myself. You?" I felt a totally irrational surge of hope, for totally unknown reasons.

"Yes travel, no alone. I wish, though."

Her voice made something stir in me. It felt all strange and tingly. I was about to open my mouth when something resembling a small, redhaired, tackily dressed hurricane whipped over with two cones of banana and mint ice cream. Added to their hair, they gave off a strange sense of traffic lights. _Red stop, green go_. The detached part of my brain realized that, under normal situations, I should've buggered off long before now, but my feet refused to budge.

"Hey Emsy! Who's this?" asked the hurricane. It had a lisp, and was dressed in scarily high heels, stripes and leopard print.

I blinked a few times to make sure I wasn't seeing double. They were dressed different, but they were most definitely twins, same hair, same height and build. They also felt different though, with different auras. I nearly rolled her eyes at that thought. Living all your life with an old hippie doesn't make you one, I scolded internally. Jesus. 18 years old and already turning into my mother. The hurricane handed an ice cream to her sister, and they licked in unsettling synchronization.

"We just got to talking," replied the former twin.

"I'm Naomi," I quipped.

"Katie," said the leopard print, "and my little sister Emily."

_Emily_. Somehow, the name made me want to grin madly. I was suddenly assaulted with images with myself and Emily walking hand in hand on the beach, kissing those oh so tantalizing lips, clothes flying - _STOP IT_, demanded my brain, snapping me out of my daydream. Very suddenly I knew I had to stay away from this girl. I opened my mouth.

"Well, as fun as all is, I've got other places to be. Nice meeting you." And without waiting for a reply, I left hurriedly, breaking into a run as soon as I'd turned the corner. It was a good 20 minutes before I collected myself enough to complete the text.

_too much trouble. Dont have a camera._

I pressed send with a lot more force than necessary, and sighed for the billionth and first time. It felt as if an age had gone by.

* * *

The rest of the day was spent wandering through tourist sites and nibbling at fish balls. I couldn't help but feeling a bit "so what" about the whole thing. Found myself back in the hotel room by dusk, with a bottle of lukewarm beer in hand and staring out into space again, with my mind somehow or other always finding its way back to a certain redhead. One that, with any luck, I'd never see again in my life.


	2. Chapter 2

Hail all readers! All the reads, favs, alerts and reviews were so encouraging that I ended up posting this chapter a bit before schedule. You're all awesome and virtual hugs all around!

**Disclaimer:** Don't own the characters from Skins. No matter how long I stay in bed dreaming about it.

* * *

**Chapter 2**

_Naomi_

I woke up in the wee hours of morning, discovering I'd fallen asleep halfway through a documentary about sharks. My laptop was still shining at me and my neck was fucking stiff.

The sky was vaguely light, a dark glowing blue color. With no hope of going back to sleep, I squinted out the window, showered, threw on some clothes and headed out. Expanding those goddamn horizons, right?

The narrow roads seemed vaguely comforting in the emerging light, and the air, still humid, enveloped my skin like a soft duvet. I took a night bus to Central, and made the whole bloody hike up the hill. (I refused to call it the Peak, since it was, in fact, just a big hill.) Got there just in time to see the first pink of dawn appearing from the horizon. In the bluish lavender light, I found a relatively flat rock to perch on, and just sat there for the next hour, watching the clouds go from purple to pink to glorious gold, the sky from dark blue to all kinds of orange and red to its regular friendly blue.

I took the first Tram back down. It was a bit like taking a portal back in time. The Peak Tram was one of those steel horses that ran through Europe late 19th century, winding down a path through the trees. The seats and most of the interior were made of wood, and rubbed shiny from years of use. Sunshine danced over the floorboards from the glass overhead, while tree after bright green tree whizzed past the large windows. A bit deliberate, but cool all the same.

The morning felt different from what I had seen the previous day. People were eating breakfast at small tables in the street, or walking around munching. I wandered into a bustling small restaurant with an inviting air about it, sat down tentatively at a corner table, and looked around. I'd read about these tea houses - there were waiters pushing around trolleys with food in wooden steaming containers, and you'd just take whatever looked good. Point and click.

I only realized how hungry I was once I sat down and was attacked by delicious smells from every angle, and my stomach rumbled loudly. I started out tentatively with seemingly amiable dishes - shrimp dumplings and tiny steamed ribs, and graduated to buns that I had no idea what they hid inside, pinkish translucent rolls sliding around in soy sauce, and devious looking white jello things floating in small bowls. I stumbled out an hour later decidedly stuffed. Why didn't you do this earlier? my brain asked, groggy with all the food.

My flight left at two in the afternoon. The clouds were thick enough that I couldn't see a thing out the window but white, blue and blinding sunlight, and I drifted off to sleep before the in-flight movie even started.

Woke with a start as the plane was descending, ear pressure killing me. Yawned several times, gathered my bags, turned on my phone, got jostled off the plane by the horde, waited drowsily for my bags. The phone buzzed.

_Waiting for u outside the gate.__ Look for the __rubiks cube. 2W_

What the fuck, I thought sleepily, as I spotted my huge green backpack sliding slowly down the tape, looking lonely and forlorn in the sea of blacks and browns.

I headed out the gate to a forest of signs, with names in all kinds of languages I couldn't understand. There was a long glass railing that people needed to walk past going out, making me feel like a monkey show. At the very forefront of the crowd, I spotted something colorful moving very fast, realizing, as I advanced on it, that it was a Rubik's cube being turned at blinding speed. I walked up to its owner, a tall girl with very short, spiky dark hair standing up at all angles, vaguely bringing to mind a skinny dinosaur, or maybe a palm tree, dressed in a plain white polo, baggy camouflage shorts and black flip flops. I had to yell to be heard over the din, "Hey! Are you Will?"

The girl looked up from her frantic cubing and grinned. "Naomi! Great to meet you finally."

We exchanged a handshake and Will pocketed her now solved cube, walking me towards a huge sign that read loudly, "AIRPORT EXPRESS".

The insides of the bright white cars were nearly empty and fucking freezing. I took a window seat, cuddling up to my bag, and studied the girl beside me.

We'd met on an online forum for freedom of... something or other. There were so many I had bookmarked that I never could keep track of the people there. We'd started talking about how the world was fucked up, and, after a few months of casual chatting, eventually moved on to life and travels. I'd had always wanted to go to exotic, faraway places, the farther the better. So when Will had proposed traveling China together, I'd jumped.

Will was a year older than me, and in her first year in uni studying theater lighting in Beijing. She spoke English with a funny accent that alternated randomly across the Atlantic.

"How was Hong Kong?" she was asking.

I grimaced. "Boring. The grub was good though."

"I take it you don't shop." She saw my face. "Yeah, I thought so."

"Hopefully Beijing is more interesting?"

"Oh sure. I love this place. You'll see."

* * *

We got out of the subway at Guomao, which was supposed to be the most, well, metropolitan area of Beijing. "I usually walk home from here, but seeing the size of your bag, we should probably take a taxi or something," Will was explaining. "I dunno who designed this shit," waving overhead at the crisscrossing bridges and roads where traffic was jammed solid, "but we have to cross this crazy intersection over here before we can get to a taxi area. The traffic lights are crap."

I watched nervously as teenage kids on bicycles and small round middle-aged women hurried across the asphalt, dodging the slow-moving cars and ignoring the flashing little red man. The sheer number of shiny silver skyscrapers around us was a bit intimidating, and combined with the noise of traffic it bordered on claustrophobic. "Maybe we should..." I trailed off as something caught my eye. Will turned to see what I was looking at, and I could nearly hear her grin as we stared at a galloping brown horse pulling a dilapidated three-wheeled cart loaded with watermelons race by, "Welcome to Beijing, mate."

We eventually elected to just walk. Half an hour of unrelenting sunshine later, she steered me through a rundown metal gate and we puffed up two flights of dark, narrow, musty stairs. The steps were decidedly tiny and what seemed like decades of wear didn't help, the edges almost rounded by uncountable pairs of feet walking up and down through the years. I had to practically walk on my toes.

She wrestled open a rusty green door and we stepped into an equally dark, tiny hall with four doors, all closed. "Ditch your stuff here," she instructed, opening a door to a small cluttered room. I heaved off my bag, dropping it haphazardly among the mess, and looked around.

"You weren't kidding when you said you're a slob," I smirked.

The room looked like it was about to overflow with stuff. A single bed took up the left wall, drowning in tangled sheets and wrinkly clothes. A desk faced the window, a wide computer screen sticking up through piles of books, random sheets of paper and half-empty biscuit wrappings. The right wall was entirely plastered with colorful printed photographs and posters of glamorous-looking Asian girls, pokemon, and Japanese animation. Each on its own gave off waves of loneliness, but bunched together the wall looked almost comical. A bookshelf was nailed to the wall just above eye level, and was seemingly sagging from the sheer amount of books piled onto it.

"I was going to clean up," came the defensive reply behind me, "y'know, get up early this morning..."

"But then you stayed in bed until you absolutely _had _to get up," I finished for her.

She shrugged. "Let's go eat already, I'm starving."

I couldn't help the image of fried bugs and roasted chicken heads from surfacing. I raised an eyebrow and tried not to turn overly green. "What do you have in mind?"

"Kebabs maybe?"

"Aren't those Turkish?"

"What can I say? It's a multinational business."

* * *

We spent the next few days wandering around Beijing, seeing all the need-to-see boring tourist sites and eating at all Will's favourite spots in town. I could tell she was making a conscious effort to avoid getting anything that would supposedly scare me off. Read, no insects, no brains or other weird organs, no outerspace-ish or overcuddly animals. There was this one incident when she slipped up and bought some kind of spicy stick-like thing that tasted a bit like beef jerky. When I asked, she told me it was tofu. I had to roll my eyes, it was almost involuntary. Since when did tofu grow bones?

We went to the Forbidden City, getting lost amid its 9999 and a half rooms and narrowly escaping being trampled by a group of rather overweight, zealous middle-aged Americans on our way to see the so-called Dragon Seat. We took the trek up Jingshan, the hill behind the Forbidden City where ancient people supposedly could get a sight of the whole city back then, to look at what only royalty was supposed to see (which, we decided, was really not a bloody lot). We peered at the exact spot the last Ming Emperor had offed himself. We walked around Houhai, got drunk in one of the numerous tiny shitty bars, and laughed our faces off at a chubby teenager who'd jumped in the lake for a swim and couldn't find his clothes when he came back. We crossed paths with a cosmic number of small fugly dogs. We chose an extremely clear day to go to the Summer Palace, got roasted a third of the way through, and ended up spending the rest of the day in the National Library.

It was a dry, hot, sunny day, making Beijing into a large baking oven, that Will had to go back to school for a final brainfuck before the holidays started, leaving me on my lonesome for a few hours. I ended up outside the Drum Tower, which supposedly told the time back when nobody had a clock. It was old, like many other things in Beijing, and the dusty scarlet paint of several centuries was peeling off annoyingly when people scraped the walls climbing up. The topmost room was full of, guess what? Drums. Rows and rows of them, standing taller than me and with drum faces the size of tables. A tour guide was droning through a megaphone to a group of elderly people in stupid red hats in a corner, who, if not deaf already, soon probably would be from listening to her. I escaped through a small wooden door out to the walk facing the street.

Looking down at all kinds of people walking by, my thoughts wandered off for a bit. It was actually not that hot up here, and the noise of traffic was faraway and not that disturbing. Down in the street, kids my age dressed in jeans and band tees sat in shops eating milk pudding beside wrinkly silverhaired people with toothless grins. Peddlers tugging along carts full of red bean cakes sat next to places selling video games, which were located right across from shops making paper umbrellas. I could see why Will loved it here, it had an awesome vibe.

From somewhere behind me, voices floated by in a language I could actually understand.

"And you get me up that early in the morning for _this_? What the fuck is your problem?"

"What the fuck is _your _problem? If you'd told me you were just here for the parties and the lads I'd have told you to stay in Bristol."

"And the parties and the lads aren't even-"

"Exactly my point. That French boy last night was downright disgusting."

It felt a bit otherworldly to be hearing people talk like that. I'd become accustomed to Will's disconcerting, bit of everything accent, and the broken, slow and heavy English of other Chinese people. Almost excited, I glanced around the corner and my stomach did a double somersault.

No fucking way.

* * *

**A/N: **[looks around nervously] So... what did you think about Will? She was originally just a tag-along character to explain local customs and tell stories, but somehow the palm tree image got stuck in my head and the character just kind of mushroomed from there. So this chapter ended up way longer than expected, with way less Emily and Katie than planned. Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer:** Don't own the Skins characters, but can't stop me from wishing for it on stars all shapes and sizes.

* * *

**Chapter 3**  
_Naomi  
_

It was _her_. Well, _them_, since they seemed to be together all the time. After that encounter in Hong Kong, I'd pushed her to the back of my mind's closet and tried to ignore how she would invade my thoughts at the most inappropriate moments. The strangest things reminded me of her - strawberry flavored soy milk, little blue flowers near a lake in the Summer Palace, a kitten licking its paws on a sunny roof. If I could ignore her popping up in my brain, maybe I had a chance of getting out of this accidental encounter.

I took a few steps backwards, retreating into the room. I could hear her sister still bitching outside about not having any fun. As inconspicuously as possible, I tried to head down the steps, only to find them packed with the elderly people in bright red baseball caps, inching downwards three steps a fucking century. Just my luck.

Huffing, I turned back into the room and slid between two drums, looking out the tiny window between them, trying to catch a glimpse of where she'd... they'd gone. I could stay here until they left... only they'd have to maneuver past the class of '43 as well. At this rate, we'd be stuck up here for at least another ten minutes. Not that long in the grand scheme of things. I'd just have to be as invisible as possible.

I was so caught up in my thoughts that I jumped visibly when a voice, _that _voice, said, not an arm's length away,

"Hey, I was wondering-"

I spun around way too fast, hitting my shoulder on a drum, emitting a hollow, resounding _boom_. Every head in the room turned to glare at me. Ignorant teenage English tourist vandalizing century old relics.

"You," was all I could muster, being a bit busy turning into a carrot.

She blinked twice before breaking into the warmest smile ever seen this side of the galaxy. "Naomi, right? We met in Hong Kong." I stared a bit more and her smile faltered. "You don't remember me."

I shook myself out of it. "No, no, of course I do. Emily, and erm, your sister Kristy?"

"Katie. What are you doing here?"

"Same thing you are. Looking at fucking drums." Our eyes met, and for a split second, the world seemed to slow. I blinked. "What was it you wanted to ask me?"

"Well," she fidgeted, "My sister wants to go to Sanlitun, since its supposed to have all the smashing bars and shit, but we have no idea how to get there."

I raised an eyebrow. "At two in the afternoon?"

"Yeah, well, she gets a bit illogical when she hasn't found a decent boy for a few days. I think she's gone back down, I should go look for her." She turned to go. Panic rose inside me - now that we'd started talking, I didn't want her to stop. And then it occurred to me.

"I don't think that's possible. The stairs were kind of blocked by -"

"Old people!" I was interrupted by a loud voice as said sister stormed past the small crevice and caught sight of us. "Why can't they all stay home and out of the way?" she fumed. "It's really hot, now that we've seen the drums can we go sit in McDonald's or something?"

Emily sighed. "You promised to go to the Bell Tower too. Besides, can't you see I'm busy?"

Katie looked at me with an expression that made me feel like a slice of pork meeting a health inspector. "I know you. Are you following us or something?"

I rolled my eyes. "Yes, Kayla, I followed you all the way from England to Hong Kong and now to Beijing so that I could look at old buildings with you."

"My name's Katie. Hey!" her face suddenly lit up. "Maybe you and Emily can go to the Bell Tower and I'll wait for you outside. I saw this boutique on the way here with the most adorable earrings. We'll meet at McDonald's in half an hour."

I glanced at Emily. It was difficult to read her expression - relieved? annoyed? hopeful? But she didn't seem opposed to the idea. I shrugged, but little green people were holding a crazy celebration dance in the back of my head.

"Sure, why not," I heard myself say. "Come on, let's go see if the Grannie Club's reached ground level yet."

* * *

We looked at the bell. We looked at the view. We ended up sitting by the wall, with the breeze on our faces and the shade of the tower on our backs, just talking. We swapped info on where we'd gone in Beijing and in Hong Kong. Turned out they'd spent a full week in HK just hanging out and shopping.

"Where are you headed to then?" I asked.

"Haven't decided yet."

"You're shitting me."

"Dead serious. We have no plans at all."

"...Right."

"I mean we used to, but the shopping got a bit out of hand in Hong Kong. Now with all the stuff we'll have to carry around, and the money shortage and all fuck... I just dunno."

I thought about it. "I've got a friend who might be able to work something out for you. I'd have to ask her first though."

Emily's face lit up as she nodded. It was like she had Christmas lights hooked up to her eyes. Suddenly, it became imperative that the rest of my life was spent making that happen as much as possible. World peace and an end to injustice would just have to wait.

"She's meeting me in," I checked my watch, "20 minutes. Think you can wait? Let's get a snack in the meantime. There's this gateau place around here I'm fairly sure I can find."

"I thought we were going to meet Katie at McDonald's?"

I frowned. "I'm boycotting them."

"Why?"

"They pay their part-timers less than minimum wages."

I braced myself for it. People laugh at me, they always do. However, this time it didn't come. I allowed my eyes to wander to her face, which they did like roads to Rome. She looked... amused, but interested, and not anywhere close to laughing at me.

And then she smiled and said, "That's awesome of you. Let's pick Katie up." And I melted a bit as I watched her walk to the stairs. She glanced backwards and caught me staring. "Coming?"

I'd just finished texting Will when I spotted Emily's sister from across the street.

"Kaitlin! Kimberly! Kelly! Krystal!" She didn't turn. _What was her name again?_ "Katrina! Katherine!"

She looked around and ignoring the honking cars, marched straight across the street to glare at me. "For the last time, the name's Katie, you dimwit. Katherine is what my grandparents call me. If you call me that again I'll have to kill you."

I rather pride myself on not being afraid of much, but I couldn't help feeling a bit intimidated by this 5 feet 3 inch whirlwind. It must've shown because Emily, who hadn't stopped chuckling all this time, intervened, "Come on Katie, let's get some _real _ice cream."

We found it eventually, a tiny place on a corner, and headed right up to the terrace. Will arrived a bit later, as Katie stirred her coffee and Emily was finishing her Black Forest. She bounded up the steps and pretty much skidded into the fourth chair panting, "Hey guys! Somebody mentioned my expertise as travel planner?"

Katie peered at Will suspiciously. "Anyone ever told you camouflage doesn't go well with stripes? Or bright blue sandals?" she asked suddenly.

Will glanced downwards. I had to admit, now that I looked at it, that the effect was rather clashing. It took her several seconds to collect herself into a smirk, "Sorry, princess, I'll make sure to ask you next time. So, how much dough do you have left and how long are you planning on staying?"

* * *

"Not doable," Will concluded firmly.

An hour and a few coffees and emptied plates later, we had still gotten nowhere. Ideas had been thrown around, routes had been charted and recharted, objectives clarified. There had been several recurring themes.

The first had been Katie repeatedly saying, "Emsy, _I_ don't want to see that," be it crypts, monuments, or temples. I'd finally had enough. "What is it that you do want to see? Because I'm don't think there are footballers or raves in the Himalayas."

"Didn't you want to see the world?" asked Emily, looking hurt.

"Didn't think the world would be this fucking boring," was the answer.

The second was Will studying maps and telling Emily, "You can't fit all that into three days. Or even a week probably."

Emily wanted to see absolutely everything. "There's a waterfall there!" she whined. Or "It's got monks!"

"Look," Will said finally, "I'm pretty sure that this Buddha is the same as the last five you've seen. Plus you'll have to climb a fucking mountain to get there, unlike the last five. Take a breather why don't you, use the time to rest up and get ready for your train."

The final was that Emily was making it difficult for me to concentrate on anything else. The fact that the table was fucking tiny meant that our bare knees were endlessly bumping into each other. It felt like someone was taking a taser to me every time. When she talked, I was more listening to her voice than the words, and the effect was hypnotizing. I thought I was doing a rather good job of covering it up by picking at a slice of gateau and studying my fork, until I glanced up during a sudden silence only to see everyone staring at me.

"What?" I demanded, a bit louder than necessary.

Katie looked annoyed, Emily looked a bit confused, and Will just had a crazy smirk on her face.

"She was just asking you, for probably the fourteenth time," Will pointed to Emily, "what you think."

I frowned, trying to figure out that I was supposed to be thinking about.

"Quick recap for those of us just abducted by aliens," said Katie. "We don't have enough money for a three month trip, not with all the shit my sister wants to see. So we should either skim over cities or ignore the entire Northern part of China."

I looked at Emily. "What's so exciting about the cities?"

"Y'know, history. And people. And food." She shrugged.

"What do you mean by skipping the North?"

"You really weren't listening at all were you?" huffed Katie.

"I was busy," I answered lamely.

Will pointed to the map on the table. "They're going to head South from Beijing, more or less following the coastline. Once they get here," jabbing a point off the shore, "they go West, eventually heading to Lhasa. If everything goes to plan, they'll pretty much be out of funds by then, so they'll have to come back directly to Beijing. They'll have just enough money to get a plane to Sydney."

I noticed Emily looked rather upset. I nudged her, ignoring the current running through my elbow at the casual touch. "What's wrong?"

She pouted and pointed to a large blue shape on the map, and made a wide trail with her fingers eastward. "Lake. Desert. Crazy rock formations. Really big plains with really green grass and fucking lots of sheep. Temples built into the side of a cliff."

I glanced at Katie - she looked almost relieved she wouldn't have to see any of that. Will was suddenly busy flipping through my notebook. "Hey!" I exclaimed. There was stuff in there I would have to cut her tongue out for.

"I've got an idea," she said simply, with a mischievous glint in her eyes. "There is one way to bring down costs."

"What?" asked the three of us in unison.

Will grinned, obviously enjoying the moment. "We do it together."

My eyebrows flew up of their own accord. "What the fuck? Aren't we going in exact different directions?"

"That's the point."

"What the fuck?" I repeated. "How can we... Oh."

"What the fuck?" asked Katie. We were starting to sound like a broken record. "Can somebody stop being fucking cryptic and tell me what's going on?"

"We take the opposite course to the one we were planning, which is pretty much identical to yours," I explained. "That means we go together."

"How does that make it cheaper? And would it be any trouble?" Emily asked, looking more sheepish by the second. "I'd hate if you had any plans and you had to give them up..." she trailed off weakly.

"No worries, Ems." I mentally kicked myself. _Where the fuck did that come from? And how did it make it out of my mouth?_ I tried to pretend I hadn't said it. No one else seemed to have noticed. "It was a really loose plan anyway. Yours is better."

"Eating is cheaper this way, saves about a third on chow in the long run. And we can take those dorms in youth hostels. Or we can share a double room. Four people is best for hiring jeeps in the West too. Deal?" Will looked at each of us.

Emily nodded happily. I shrugged, trying to look nonchalant. An hour ago, I was doing whatever I could, including hiding, to get away from this girl. Now, I was readily tying myself to her for the next three months.

_She's like a drug_, I realized. _Once you've started, you can never stop._

Katie frowned at us in general, but mostly at Will. "If we're going to be stuck together, there are some things I need to know about you. I mean, what if you're planning to drug us and sell our stuff and we end up getting shipped back home totally starkers?"

I was suddenly attacked by a very vivid image of a naked Emily waiting to be shipped. "I need an ice cream," I croaked, stumbling downstairs. I flipped through the menu, barely registering the pictures, and blindly pointed to the biggest item I saw. The boy behind the counter looked faintly alarmed, but began promptly to scoop large spoonfuls of vanilla ice cream into a container resembling a mid-sized fish tank, then heaped on half a pack of Oreos, an assortment of nuts, a chopped up banana and several chocolate flakes, and handed it to me on a cracked plastic tray.

"Are you planning on feeding Bigfoot by any chance?" asked Emily as I emerged up the stairwell.

"Celebration ice cream sharing. It's mandatory."

Katie was studying Will's student pass (which I'm sure she couldn't understand a word of) and asking, "Do you have a criminal record?"

"Why the fuck would I have one of those?"

"Where did you learn your English? It sounds fishy."

"On the seashore."

Katie glared. Will sighed.

"I lived in lots of places. Liverpool, Miami, Vancouver, Singapore. Always on the fucking seashore. Hence fishy."

"How much money do you have?"

"More than you do anyway."

"What do your parents do?"

Will scowled for the first time since I'd met her four days ago. "Nothing illegal. Now can we shut the fuck up and eat some ice cream?"

We dug in in silence. I couldn't help noticing the way Emily would lick the spoon in the most adorable way. My own spoon momentarily stopped halfway to my mouth as I watched her, mouth half-open and mesmerized, before I caught myself and started eating.

"One last thing," Katie was saying to Will. "You're gay?"

Emily choked on her banana. Will, who had just nicked one of the Oreos, replied through a mouthful of cookie, "Window." Chewed hastily, gulped, and managed a chocolaty smirk. "It's obvious enough."

"You couldn't be more obvious if you had 'dyke' painted on your forehead."

"I do actually, you just can't see it because I'm so glaringly gay."

"If you try anything funny in the middle of the night, I _will _kick the shit out of you." Menacing smirk.

Will nodded solemnly. "Noted."

It was like they had exchanged a handshake.

* * *

We decided that the twins should just move into Will's place while we were there. We piled into a taxi, Katie sandwiched between Emily and me in the rear, which of course she grumbled loudly about. Will asked from the front seat, "I kinda forgot to ask, what's your names?"

"Emily, and, erm, er, Katie," I replied, under a sudden death stare from my right.

Will turned back with a stunned expression on her face. "You're Emily and Katie _Fitch_?"

.

.

**A/N:** So, Fitch-tasticness! I'm not totally happy with this chap, having a bit trouble channeling their flow. Oh well.

I know I shouldn't be doing this so early into the story, but I'll be on a business trip for the next week or so, which means I'll either be too busy to remember my own name (thus no update), or I'll be bored out of my head and write the next three chapters while there. Let's hope for the second option.


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N:** Just a short chapter this time. Emily got all contemplative on me at the end, but I promise it'll get to the good stuff soon.

**Disclaimer: **Not mine, not mine.

* * *

**Chapter 4**

_Emily_

"You're Emily and Katie _Fitch_?" Will suddenly asked from the front seat, turning around looking fully stunned. I glanced at Katie, who nodded and stared at Will blankly.

"Who the fuck are you?" she demanded, in full tornado mode.

"I'm Willow Wong, we took art together with Ms. Harraday. You two were nine or ten I think? I got orange paint on Katie's dress the day we were making pottery."

Of course I remembered. It was the summer we'd spent in Liverpool, staying there with one of Dad's old mates and his wife and half a dozen children. My mother had had one of her fits of artistic aspirations for her girls, packing us off to art class for two hours three times a week. Katie had been surprisingly good at it, producing perfectly shadowed sketches of apples and eggs and David Beckham, while I had floundered and sank. I ended up sitting in the back of the class, where the teacher had pointedly ignored me for the rest of the course. And now that I thought about it, there was this other girl who sat next to me in the back, who was tall and awkward and had sunk just as hard.

"That was you?" asked Katie for the both of us. "The weird kid with the ancient green bike and scruffy haircut and really filthy tennis shoes?"

Will's face fell a little. "Borderline personal attacks much, Katiekins?"

Katie's face scrunched up a little, and I had to stop myself from snickering. Nobody had called her that for _years_. Besides, I guess Will had already insured her lifelong position in the bad half of Katie's books with that paint incident. She'd really liked that dress.

"Well, let's just say someone hasn't changed much," muttered my sister. She looked up, as if to ask the universe (through the steel roof of a taxi) why this person from her ancient past had been chosen to come back to torment her. And why Katie had no choice but to stick with it.

Unexpected turn of events, stated my brain. And that was what this trip was turning out to be in more ways than one.

Traveling had been more my idea than Katie's, but I was still her baby sister, and final year of college she had become desperate to escape her life and everything in it, so she insisted in coming with me. Hong Kong had been our first stop, and Katie had become a shark in water, or maybe a sweet-toothed tiger in a candy shop. Hong Kong had made me feel like her sister again, and not her shadow, and that was probably why I'd let my judgment slip for a few days... and we ended up spending way more than we were supposed to, and loaded down with a whole lot more stuff than expected.

Will didn't seem to think it was a problem. "Just post it home, yeah?" she'd suggested, shrugging. "Or ditch it at my place, nobody's going to be using the rooms anyway."

So yeah, the whole traveling thing was turning out quite unexpected. Katie had been in rare good moods (I could tell because she never once tried to throw me at a boy), we'd run into Will, and then there was _her_. Not least because of her. Naomi.

The corners of my mouth were trying furiously to tug upwards at this thought as I watched buildings and people whiz by the window, although I firmly stopped them. She was cool. She was witty. She had a big attitude and she cared about things. And she was beautiful to boot. Yes, I sighed inwardly, she was all of those things, but she was probably not gay. Friends. I'd settle for friends.

Still, the thought of hanging out with her for the next few months made the corners of my mouth very, very happy.

* * *

We packed with very little difficulty, since we were barely unpacked anyway. While Katie checked us out, I headed outside for some sun - the hotel lobby was like the inside of a refrigerator. I spotted Will and Naomi perched on the steps, with matching fags hanging out of their mouths.

"Can I have one?" It was impossible to smoke in Katie's presence without her talking my head off about cancer and disgusting black lungs.

"Naomi here just nicked my last one," Will replied apologetically. "Share?"

I took her extended half-gone roll and was about to put it in my mouth when I noticed Naomi staring at it as if it had just insulted her mother. I handed it back to Will.

"Nah, Katie will never shut up if she smells it on me." Well, it was the truth. "What should we do later?"

Naomi shrugged. "Somebody mentioned having fun?"

Which is why a few hours later, the four of us were buzzingly drunk and dancing along happily in very loud music. Well, you could say that Katie and I were dancing. Naomi bopped around, er, badly, and Will was doing some indescribable thrash headbang thing. Suffice it to say neither looked very attractive (in fact, Katie pulled me over to yell in my ear, they looked like fucking lunatics), but by now we were past caring.

Katie had several boys of various nationalities hovering around her. She was looking just... really Katie. I noticed Will and some random girl stare each other down, snog, and disappear to the toilets. Naomi suddenly leaned over so close that I could feel her breath on my ear, sending shivers up my spine. "Spliff?" she asked simply, and pointed to the door. I nodded.

We leaned up the wall beside a flashing neon light and I watched her roll one carefully and hand it to me. She was about to start on a second when I stopped her. "Share?"

"Katie really likes male attention doesn't she?" she asked me with a smirk as I puffed.

I nodded again, and handed it over. She looked at me for a second with those piercing blue eyes before taking it. "What about you? It's not like you can't get any, I dunno if you've noticed but you do look the same."

"Not interested," I muttered.

"In that huge bloke in the Hawaii shirt or boys in general?"

"It's... complicated."

Naomi snorted. "I'm smart."

"Yeah, I'm sure you are, _Naoms_," I replied, snickering at the look on her face. _Of course I would notice._

We shared lopsided grins for a long moment. My stomach suddenly flipped over, and panic gripped me. Normal, I tried to calm myself. We can do normal right? Last thing I wanted was to do something crazy stupid and not see her the rest of my life.

I hid my face by snatching the small smoking stick and taking a long draw.

"Quit hogging it," she laughed, and we dissolved into giggles. Disaster avoided.

"Hey guys," yelled Will, still operating at the volume of the party inside, and plopping down on the ground next to me. "Wanna go home? This is getting old. Where's Katie?"

We found her in a corner with a boy, and it looked as if they were trying to suck the lips off of each other's faces. It took a bit of convincing before we could peel her off him and hail a taxi. She promptly fell asleep in the back seat.

"What should we do tomorrow?" I asked.

"Spend a day just looking around at real live people," said Naomi's voice from outside. She was hanging her head out the window to prevent puking.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Will sounded a bit groggy. Seemed I was the least drunk.

"People. How they live and what they're really like," Naomi shrugged best she could with one shoulder crammed again the taxi door.

"I'm people," Will replied.

Katie yelled something intelligible in her drunken stupor.

"She doesn't seem to think so, mate."

"What do you think Ems?"

I looked to my left at Naomi, with her blonde locks trailing in the wind, faintly glowing in the light of late night streetlamps. "Sure, yeah, people sound cool."

* * *

I lay in Will's parents' bed, totally unable to sleep. Katie snored softly next to me. We hadn't shared a bed since forever, spare rare family outings. These were some of the moments that I felt really close to my sister. Other times, she would just be Katie, and overbearing, and manipulative.

Most people didn't get the twin thing. Just siblings that are the same age, they say. What's the big deal about that? But sometimes, I find myself thinking that sharing that same tiny place for the most of a year, we had to have something deeper.

Something that neither Naomi, the girl that kept invading my dreams, nor Will, who had suddenly emerged from ancient history, would understand. They were both single kids, with no brothers, or sisters, or anything resembling that, to share this link with.

I listened to Naomi's slightly left of mainstream indie alternative music blaring from her laptop speakers, and Will shuffling around the couch outside. That was when it hit me – we were all lonely. I was just as lonely as they were, only in different ways. Just as lonely, or even more so, even if I were attached to someone as a twin, and Katie, being that twin, was just as lonely. Which was why I hid behind whatever I could find, Naomi was sarcastic and hot-and-cold, Will buried herself in various gadgets and skills, and Katie shagged lots of boys. I wondered, as I drifted off to sleep, if one day we would find someone. It seemed that it wasn't going to happen anytime soon.

.

.


	5. Chapter 5

**Disclaimer:** Ain't mine! [wails]

**A/N:** I never know what to put here. Lots of people have very long author's notes, which baffles me to no end.

If you haven't yet, go check out the new story by Esdiferente, called **Close Protection**. Epic awesomeness the size of planets.

* * *

**Chapter 5**

_Naomi_

I was dreaming. I was drifting along in a sea of clear, rippling syrupy liquid, above a brilliant blue sky without a cloud in sight. The sun was shining, but it was extremely cold.

I spotted a raft in the distance, just a tiny dark speck, and suddenly it was closer, close enough that I could almost make out the person on it. It was a girl, I could tell, with a pole. I tried to swim towards her, but the thickness of the ocean made it impossible to move. _That's strange,_ I thought in my dream state. _Isn't syrup supposed to increase the amount of push swimming gives you?_

And so I flailed and floated around desperately, trying to reach the raft. And all the time it was just getting colder and colder.

I'm going to drown, I realized. But I wasn't going to give up just yet.

The dream was shattered, suddenly, by the loud clattering of plates. I opened my eyes, feeling the cold drip away and the warmth of an early summer morning come flowing back. I glanced at my phone - 6:14, swore, and charged into the kitchen, huffing, "What the fucking hell at all ungodly hours in the morning. I'm going to fucking kill whoever..." and stopped short.

Will was sitting on the kitchen table in furry blue pj's, barefoot, stirring a bowl of unbelievably delicious looking noodles. She smirked. "Morning to you too, sunshine. More in the pot."

I filled myself a bowl, noticing dirty plates and bowls sitting in the sink. Plopping onto the table, I asked as nonchalantly as possible, now that I was being fed, "What were you going at making a racket around at six in the morning?"

Will glanced at me in disbelief. "Police cars, garbage trucks, upstairs neighbors thumping around all this time, and you decide to get woken up by a plate?"

"It was a _loud _plate. And why are you up so early?"

Will was about to answer when footsteps came from the hall. I looked up just in time to see a half awake Emily appear in the doorway in a faded pink shirt and checkered girl boxers. My jaw slackened ever so slightly, but I snapped my mouth shut hurriedly and busied myself eating noodles.

"I smelled something," Emily mumbled, and floated towards the pot, reminding me of old Tom and Jerry cartoons, where the mouse would gravitate towards the cheese, suspended on the strings of aroma by his nose. "Who cooked?"

"Katie still out of it?" I asked, as I watched her struggle with chopsticks.

"It'll take her a while to sleep it off. Is there a fork anywhere?"

Will pointed to a cupboard. Her phone rang, a folky guitar of some sort. As she moved towards the window and talked in Chinese, I watched Emily fork noodles awkwardly into her decidedly tiny bowl. The noodles were persistently going anywhere except where they were supposed to.

"Trouble with chopsticks?" I teased.

She huffed. "Dad hates Chinese food so we never got a chance to practice."

"My Mum loves raw fish."

She simply raised an eyebrow at me. "I guess you were raised on all kinds of exotic food then."

"Nah, can't stomach the stuff. Fish and chips kind of girl, me."

Emily suddenly glanced at the door. I turned just in time to see Katie stumbling past it on her way to wash up. "Fuck you all," she was muttering. "Need beauty sleep, yeah?" And she disappeared through the door.

"Nice morning person," I remarked.

Emily chuckled. "You should've seen the time this boy she dumped showed up at 4 in the morning to-"

We were interrupted by a small scream followed by a string of loud swearing and a few bangs. Katie reappeared in the door, looking fully awake.

"Get in here," she ordered tensely.

We followed her into the bathroom, where she pointed to the sink. I moved closer to peer inside, only to find a cockroach the size of a credit card lounging in the bottom. "Ewwww," I heard Emily comment behind me. I spun left and right madly trying to find something to ward it off, didn't find anything, and took a few involuntary steps backwards, mirroring Katie's position in the other side of the doorway.

Emily rolled her eyes at the both of us cowering behind the doorframe and grabbed some toilet paper. I couldn't really tell what was happening from the hall, but I was pretty sure the sickening crunch could be heard from a mile away.

"One of my high school buddies is planning a trip in Shandong," Will's voice drifted through the kitchen. "We should probably go with, it'll save us a lot of transportation costs. He's leaving this afternoon though, so we should start getting packed." She stopped short at the sight of all three of us standing around the sink looking disgusted. "What?"

"You have giant cockroaches in your tap," Katie informed her.

She didn't seem disturbed. "All the more reason to get out of this shithole then."

* * *

Emily and Katie had gone out to buy grub and stuff for the road after a weird lunch that was made basically by cleaning out the fridge. I was done packing and was writing Effy an email that was turning out way too long. I'd talked a lot about Beijing and food and old dusty buildings, and was starting a new paragraph.

_Oh and we got some traveling partners. Emily and Katie Fitch. Twins, from Bristol. They're short. Katie is loud and a bit obnoxious, and Emily's her opposite. Well, kind of. We're going to be going together on this trip to save money and, according to Will, be safer. Went out yesterday night, got really shitfaced, which is probably nothing new. Started talking with Emily, she's actually hilarious and interesting when she's alone. Also kinda hot, and whenever she's around I get this funny feeling in my chest like_

Fuck. I stared at the last part, where the fuck did that come from? Deleted hastily, X'ed it and pressed send. Keep your cool, Naomi.

I checked my bags for a final time, making sure I had everything I was going to need. Although I'd been planning this for ages, I couldn't seem to wrap my head around the fact that I was going to be living off nothing but the things in my bag for the next few months. My computer beeped at me. It was, what, 4 in the morning in London? I couldn't believe Effy was still awake and sober enough to read email.

Scratch the sober part, her reply was comprised of one word. No _Hi Naomi_, or _Alright?_, or even _x Effy_. Just one single fucking word.

_Pictures!_

She even used exclamation marks, Effy _never _uses exclamations. This must be serious. Which led me to shuffle out into the living room where Will was wrestling with the straps on her bag.

"I need a camera."

She looked up from her bright orange backpack and sat down on the floor. "Second drawer under the telly."

I found an ancient-looking digital camera bag sitting among old newspaper clippings and comic books. It didn't look like it could take a breeze without disintegrating, much less a picture. "Seriously?"

Will grimaced. "Come on, don't judge a camera by its bag yeah? I used to love the little bugger before I got this baby." Pointed to a battered-looking SLR.

I fumbled with the bulky controls as the lens whirred a bit and then miraculously opened. The screen flashed at me a bit and told me I should charge the batteries.

The front door creaked open, and Emily shifted inside, her arms full of groceries and a triumphant grin on her flushed face. I managed to press the shutter just before the camera screen protested with the picture of an empty container and went black.

* * *

"Jonah Jeremiah Jones," said the sandy-haired boy standing outside the silver minivan. "Or mainly known as JJ. Although I could be called Triple J, seeing that would be more accurate and comprehensive, but then again people don't seem to include second names in-"

"JJ!" Will interupted his seemingly endless rambling. "Next topic, yeah?"

"Yeah," he nodded matter-of-factly. "Right. I'm Australian, I've been living in China for the past three years, and right now I'm doing mathematical studies at the University of Science and Technology."

"High school buddy?" asked Emily.

"Not entirely correct," replied JJ, as he helped us load our bags into the back. "We did take some classes together, outside of school, which, despite the fact that we were in high school at the time, doesn't make us high school... hey," he suddenly looked at Will in surprise, "I'm your buddy?"

She sighed. "Yes, JJ. We're friends, buddies, amigos, mates. Whatever you want to call it."

He positively beamed. We piled into the car.

It was a three row seven seater, with holes in the cushions and several missing window rockers. JJ grinned through the rear view mirror to all of us. "Shandong! Home of awesome seafood, roasted sweet potatoes, Confusius and the biggest bowls in the country!"

Which started a four hour journey during which I tried to read and take pictures and failed at both, Emily slept, Katie listened to her ipod and JJ and Will chatted (in Chinese for the most part) up front. I was sitting in the back row, making conversation with the front two virtually impossible. I spent my time staring at the back of Emily's head and her soft, vibrantly red hair. Not a bad view, but even that got boring after four hours.

We eventually pulled into a city of some kind just before dusk.

Katie peered out the window. "It's filthy," was her conclusion.

Will grunted. "Hometown, yeah? No bashing."

But it was. Streets that were trying at stately and only managed to look empty. Not a lot of green, leaving dusty patches pretty much everywhere. Wherever I looked, it gave a sense of disarray.

"Where to for dinner?" asked JJ.

"Dumplings maybe?" replied a very sleepy Emily.

I guess she didn't know what she was getting us into.

Half an hour later we were sitting in a stark white restaurant, and the three of us were stuck trying to decipher the strange things the people of Shandong like to put into their dumplings. And the fact that no less than a dozen meats were available for free pairing with about twenty kinds of vegetables, well, let's just say it didn't help.

"Mutton and celery maybe?" suggested Emily.

"Mutton goes best with carrots," said JJ, suddenly concentrating his gaze on the far wall. "Lotus roots with pork. Celery with eggs. Mushrooms with - "

"JJ!" the four of us said in unison. One afternoon in a car together had taught us that JJ gets locked on at times. He blinked.

"Mushrooms with what?" I asked out of pure curiosity.

"Vermicelli and... what's it called?" Will glanced at JJ.

"I believe it's commonly known as tree fungus."

I gulped. "Forget I asked."

We eventually settled on several types of strange-sounding fillings. JJ insisted on telling us all about the very complicated rules and customs of drinking at Chinese banquets, such as if the guy sitting next to the door drinks one glass then everyone has to follow with one glass. We ordered a bottle of _baijiu_, which means "white alcohol", and looked like water, smelled like bread and tasted like a cross between vodka and, strangely enough, popcorn. It burned its way slowly down to my stomach and then right back up to the back of my head. It was a weird sensation.

Then we piled back into the car and JJ (who thankfully didn't drink at all) drove us into a... schoolyard?

"My grandparents used to teach here before they died. Their apartment is right out back," Will explained. "I still have a key. Nobody's lived there for more than a year, but it's free lodging."

I was expecting an old crowded brick building like her tiny place in Beijing but the pale gray outside was new, almost shiny. Clusters of garlic hung from people's windows, and an army of bicycles were lined up against the walls.

JJ caught us staring. "It's a trait of Shandong cooking. People eat lots of garlic. So generally they have really bad breath."

Katie nudged Emily in the back. "See, I told you they weren't fending off vampires."

Will unlocked an ominous-looking heavy black door and we trooped into a rather large living room with Chinese ink paintings and calligraphy covering the walls. Sheets were draped over the vague shapes of two large sofas.

Katie opened a door tentatively, as if expecting the ghosts of boyfriends past to emerge. "That's my grandparents' room, for you and Emily," Will tugged the sheets off the sofas and dumped them on the floor. "That one's my room, for JJ," pointing to a door with a poster of some random shoreline. "Naomikins, my mum's room is over here. You're -"

She broke off as the door refused to budge, and glared at the handle for a moment as if blaming it for the locked door.

"Homeless," I completed glumly.

"Fuck's sake," she muttered. "Fuck my mother's outlandish ideas of privacy." She gave me an apologetic look. "Couch then?"

* * *

Couch it was. It wasn't half bad really, since there was more than enough space in the larger sofa. (Will, being hospitable as always, was curled up in the smaller couch and looked less comfortable than a canned sardine.) The only awkward part was that my feet dangled over one end, and I kept getting the feeling something was going to crawl out from under the couch and grab my ankles.

Which is why it scared the living bollocks out of me when something ran into them in the middle of the night.

"Fucking hell!" I yelped and threw a cushion at it.

A car drove by the window, lighting up the room briefly to show a sheepish-looking half asleep Emily with a pig-shaped pillow in her arms.

"Ems?" I ventured, at a much more reasonable volume. "What's up?" We glanced at Will, who continued to sleep like a rolled-up petrified log.

Emily looked beautiful, I noticed, in the dim light. Even more than usual. Her red hair shone a subtle purple, and shadows played on her features. She was in the same faded shirt and boxers I'd seen her in that morning, showing a rather inadequate amount of skin. I closed my eyes briefly and tried to slow down my heart rate. Not very effectively, I might add.

"Sorry," she mumbled, and yawned. "Didn't see you. Couldn't sleep."

"Go back to bed, it'll come," I tried to dismiss her. This whole situation seemed a bit too dangerous to me, and only God knows why I keep doing unexplainable things when she's around. But then I looked at her face, and things then just happened of their own accord.

I sat up and patted the space I'd vacated.

"Sit then?"

.

.


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N:** This chapter came to be because one of my friends mentioned that seeing Naomily happen from a third set of eyes would be interesting.

Oh and about the "inadequate amount of skin" thing last chapter, that was truly not done on purpose. Can we treat it as a Freudian slip of Naomi's? (And not mine...)

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Skins, but I fucking love it!

* * *

**Chapter 6**

_Will_

At first I thought there were mice in the house. Don't laugh, it's happened. But then, as my mind became slightly less befuddled, I realized the mice had voices. And they were giggling.

I cracked open an eyelid and saw very strange activities commencing on the couch opposite mine. Naomi's pale blonde hair was all I could see clearly in the dark, but the dark shadows were moving in very suggestive ways, with plenty of huffing and puffing. Whoa, was my first thought. Who spiked my drink? My foot had fallen asleep, and I needed to pee.

They collapsed into a heap and continued to laugh uncontrollably.

"Told you," said Naomi's voice. "Even with Papa Fitch gym training, you can't pull off _that _many pushups."

"Oh come on, tickling me isn't playing fair."

So that's what's happening. I nearly laughed out loud before realizing I was supposed to be asleep. I pondered getting up and leaving them to it, but figured it'd be all kinds of awkward. I settled for a crazy grin that I know they wouldn't be able to see in the dark, straightened out as silently as possible, and waited.

"Hey," said Emily's hushed voice. "Are we being too loud?"

"Nah," replied Naomi. "It's the middle of the night. Now get the fuck off me."

A lot of rustling and creaking.

Naomi's voice, seemingly upright by now, "You have really nice tits, you know that?"

Slapping noise. "Perv. But thanks, nobody's ever told me that before. It's always been about Katie and her fucking cleavage."

"What? Just because they're hanging out all the time?"

"Well obviously. It sucks the air out the room every time."

"You should probably talk to her about that. She'll have Buddhist monks and Taoist priests following her around wherever she goes. Me, I like girls who are a bit more subtle."

"You like girls? As in like, like?"

Short silence. "I haven't really thought about it like that, but, no labeling, you know? If you attach words to people like gay, cheerful, stupid and such, the person kinda fades away and all is left are the adjectives."

"So that makes you, what? Indescribable?"

"More like undetermined."

"Oh." Pause. "Well, me too."

"Unlabeled?"

"Undetermined."

"That's... good. Undetermined. Full of potential."

"That could be a slogan."

"For pregnancy tests that don't work?"

"Among other things."

They shared a chuckle, which led to a comfortable silence. I took it as my cue to get my arse out of the situation.

Yawned, rolled awkwardly off the couch, stumbled into the toilet pretending not to see them.

When I came back, Emily was gone and Naomi was (probably) pretending to be asleep.

* * *

We arrived in Qufu the next afternoon a bit behind schedule.

"Confucius place. Not much here not connected to him anyway. There are three parts to the Confucian temple thing," JJ was saying.

"I read about it, erm, the Temple, the Forest and the Mansion right?" Emily added. "His descendants lived here for more than 70 generations before this place was turned into a museum."

"More like a tourist trap if you ask me," muttered Katie.

The main thing there seemed to be tour groups. Noisy swarms of little kids ran around being annoying and their grandparents ran around after them between clusters of huge buses. An immense rock wall rose up through the dust.

We checked ourselves into a Youth Hostel and got a four-bed room plus a dorm bed for JJ. I dropped my bag on the floor and launched myself onto a top bunk, and watched Katie do the same. It surprised me somewhat, I always took Katie for a bottom bunk kind of person.

"There's supposed to be this weird tree in there, that kinda separated into five trees from one," I heard Emily continue from down below. "Let's go, I think they're closing soon."

I groaned and tried to hide in my pillow. Emily and her crazy enthusiasm. "They're not. You go, I'll stay here."

Suddenly Naomi's face appeared so close to mine I jumped. "Why?" she asked quizzically.

"It's bloody hot out there and I'm tired."

"No you're not. Why?"

Since when was Naomi so good at reading people? "I fucking hate the guy."

"Who? JJ?"

"No, Confucius."

Katie slid down the bunk ladder fireman style as if she'd been doing this all her life, and looked at me with her hands on her hips. "Come on you big wuss. You're here, might as well face him."

I grimaced at her. "Katiekins, you do realize he's been dead for two thousand years. What's there to face?"

She smirked wickedly. "Exactly. What's there to avoid then? It's just a fucking building."

* * *

I followed the four of them glumly through the huge gateways, across the willow-lined moat, past mythical stone creatures who mocked me with their silence. I hated Confucius. He had all these boring ideas about how our places are fixed and we have to live our lives accordingly, which made him really popular with Emperors, since if everyone listened to him nobody would try to overthrow their governments. How convenient is that?

Throughout the Confucian Temple, plaques, stone tablets and paintings talked about how awesome Big C was and how his teachings should be followed for eternity. JJ was translating loudly from inscriptions in a large wall, attracting quite a crowd. This I remembered from Local History in high school - the first Ming Emperor who had just overthrown his previous dynasty came to visit the family, dictating a bunch of rules that had to be written down by someone else since his Mightiness couldn't read. It was all kinds of hilarious, since it was all engraved as it was said, and rather impolite. Plus, I thought to myself, he kind of went against everything by becoming the Emperor in the first place, no?

I noticed Naomi sneaking away with her, well, my camera. Heaven knows I need an escape too, I thought, but got stuck in a stampede of tiny summer campers as I tried to follow. By the time they'd passed, she'd disappeared into a pavilion of some sort.

I heard them before I saw them.

"Following me around now, Emily?"

"No." It didn't sound very convincing. "Wanted to ask for a smoke."

"Pretty sure that'd be frowned on here. Wouldn't want to torch the place would we."

"Why are you such a prick sometimes?"

"You bring out the best in people."

What's with me and unintentional eavesdropping today? I grumbled under my breath, and turned to leave them alone to... whatever this was they were doing. However, I hadn't gotten far before Emily's voice followed me, "Right. Fuck this. Enjoy yourself then."

I busied myself staring at a tree a reasonable distance away. It took me a few seconds to realize that this was the tree. _The _tree, the-one-tree-becomes-five-trees tree. Even stranger, another type of tree had grown out of the middle of the five, making a lopsided star-shape with a different tree in the middle.

"Hi Emily," I offered.

She only glared at me.

"Tree," I continued, pointing rather stupidly.

She commenced to glare at the tree, only to notice a few seconds later (like me), that it was _the _tree.

"It's weird," she commented. "Look at how they act like they aren't connected to each other, but if you try to separate them they'll hurt and probably die. And if being tied together wasn't bad enough, they have to pretend there's nothing special between them at all."

My brow furrowed. Was there some crazy symbolism in there I'd missed?

We continued to wander around the massive grounds, while the tour groups began trickling out as the sun went down. Most groups didn't stay the night. Bigger monuments to gawk at and so on.

I found Naomi squinting into the sunset from the top of the city wall, trying to take a picture of the silhouette of the buildings.

"Turning out to be quite the photographer, Naomi?"

"Shut up."

"Being nice won't really kill you, despite popular myth."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Right. To clarify, being nice to Emily won't kill you, although it may cause headaches and dizziness."

She snorted. "You should know me well enough to know that I don't do the touchy feely best friend thing."

"Who said anything about friends?"

She took her face out of the viewfinder to look at me in unabashed surprise.

I felt like I'd done enough prodding for the day. "You'll miss your sunset," I told her, snapped a few shots of my own, and went down the steps into the Confucian Forest.

The trees cast long dark shadows onto the winding gray brick path. Small stone lions stood solemnly on both sides of the door to the tomb. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear Emily and JJ laughing about some ridiculous looking turtle statue.

"Is this what it was like, C-man?" I asked out loud, having no idea what I was doing. "Did you feel like you didn't fit anywhere? Like you were clinging to something that wasn't there to hold onto anymore? Even though if it was up to me, I wouldn't choose ancient traditions and values dude. Totally setting yourself up to be used."

The stone lions gave me an annoyed Look.

"I know, I know. Not supposed to talk to the Master like that. But respect is supposed to go both ways. The world isn't clean cut. If you try to make it that way, people are going to get hurt."

"Are you talking to dead people?" asked Katie's voice. I immediately felt extremely idiotic.

"Just the one," I replied defensively. The zebra print bow in her hair brought me abruptly back to the real world.

"Because we don't understand?"

I simply shrugged.

"You can't know that," she said, and walked away.

I was alone again with the Big C. I contemplated talking to him a bit more, but found I had nothing to say.

Instead, Katie's words kind of stuck in my head. Are you talking to dead people? She'd asked.

You're right, I answered in my head. I should talk to living people for a change.

.

.

**A/N:** Naomi is doing the three steps forward two steps back thing. I'd talk to her about it, but I think Will's got that covered.


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N:** Weird space where I don't know what to say. [looks around nervously at the crowd] Right. Straight to the story then.

**Disclaimer:** Don't own Skins in this or any alternate reality.

* * *

**Chapter 7**

_Naomi_

JJ was muttering something about snoring Swiss boys with skunk feet, and looked ready to topple over at any second, so Will took the wheel while he stretched out in the back row. Before anyone could protest, Katie had jerked open the door and took the seat up front, sticking us together.

_U_s. The simple word made my stomach launch into a wildly aggravated version of the shimmies.

So there I was, sitting next to the girl who made me feel these very strange things, while Will listened to boring music and Katie slept. The detached part of my brain wondered why she wanted the front seat if all she was going to do was sleep. I realized it hadn't appeared for quite a while. Long time no see, brain.

It was drizzling a bit outside. Bluish nondescript landscape passed us as blurs.

I chanced a peek over at Emily. She was staring out the window, a book on Chinese history lying forgotten in her lap. Her fingers ran up and down the edges of the book absentmindedly. I wondered how those fingers would feel like entwined with mine. I wondered what her hair would feel like in my palms. I wondered what she meant by undetermined. I wondered why the fuck I was wondering about so many things. Life had never been this confusing.

I reached down into my bag and pulled out my fat notebook. Flipping to an empty page, I wrote,

_Non-prick status reporting_

I poked her with the butt of my pen and showed her the page.

She looked at the words suspiciously, and then at me. I gave her my best 'really truly not biting' face.

Emily sighed slightly, took the pen and started scribbling.

_If only there was a way to jam the switch_

Emily's handwriting was small, roundish, unlike my sprawling loopy scrawl. Neat and cute, like herself. A smile appeared before I could stop it. Emily met it with a small one of her own. She went on writing,

_You still owe me_

I quirked an eyebrow.

_I'll buy you dinner if that's what you want_

I replied with a flourish. This was rewarded with a puzzled expression, followed by a smirk.

_Do I really look that cheap? Fine, but you'll have to eat whatever I order_

I shrugged.

_Whatever. Tell me about yourself_

_What do you want to know?_

She asked. Will's sappy piano music was seriously getting on my nerves, so I wrote,

_For starters, have you ever seen the Loch Ness monster?_

Emily's face did this adorable amused/disgusted/speechless expression while she turned to a new page and wrote her answer. She showed me the page with a smirk.

_YES_

it said, with little flowers and sunshine.

I grinned as I wrote,

_Did it have purple antenna?_

I was pretty sure she had very strange images floating around in her head as she replied,

_Nessie asks everybody not to tell_

So I asked,

_How do we identify it if nobody can describe it?_

And Emily was giggling out loud as she replied,

_I'm sure we'll know it when we see it._

And so we went on writing until we were laughing so hard we woke JJ up, who repeated, "Fuckity fuck," so many times he woke Katie up, and things went rather downhill from there.

* * *

"You have to be fucking shitting me, Ems," I muttered in absolute shock.

They smirked at me, all four of them in eerie agreement.

Katie commented, "In return for you not being a twat, we're showing you new things. How nice of us."

A large fish head stared at me from between small clusters of red peppers. Mutant prawn lined up into a purplish pyramid of claws and legs. A pile of tofu mixed with tree leaves swayed dangerously, threatening to collapse. It seemed that, after I'd rashly agreed to eat anything she got me, Emily had conspired with the rest of them to order the strangest things on the menu during our first meal in Qingdao.

JJ was eagerly chewing on what looked like small brown beans. "What are those?" I asked him. They looked the most harmless.

He switched the dish with the fish head, placing it right in front of me. The fish's lips wobbled in protest. "Try them out, they're really good. I think the name is silkworms?"

I dropped them from halfway to my mouth. "They don't have eyes," I managed to say.

"Would it be any better if they did?" asked Emily, picking up some tree leaves. Her skills with chopsticks were getting much better.

JJ turned to Katie to ask, "Would you like the fish brain? It's rather the best part."

She shrugged. "Sure, whatever. What are those weird scorpion things?"

"Prawn of some kind," explained Will, as she started taking the fish apart. "Dunno what they're called in English."

I picked one up gingerly by the head. It shook and jittered as if it were alive. "How do we eat them?" I asked no one in particular.

Will smirked. "Carefully."

I huffed. Apparently no one was going to give me an easy time.

The Fearless Fitches attacked the queasy cuisine with gusto, and Will and JJ kept talking about which bugs were best fried. Emily kept shooting me those eyes that said, _dare ya_. They made my insides boil. I was feeling extremely stupid, and sure I was turning as red as a lobster. (A real, common, cooked one.) Eventually, I swallowed in resolution, closed my eyes, and dropped a spoonful of silkworms into my mouth. They made squeaky sounds as I chewed.

I opened my eyes to find everyone staring at me. Again.

"Well?" asked Emily.

I thought about it. "Not half bad, as long as you don't dwell on it."

JJ grinned. "That's actually the tried and true way of doing most new things. There are now many new things you might want to try in Qingdao food which is known for its varied seafood, such as sea cucumber, although that's probably a bit too expensive for your budget, or maybe sea worms, which are arguably best when eaten stir-fried with leek..."

He rambled on for a few more minutes and no one tried to stop him, while I finally grew a pair (figuratively) and tried out other alien sea critters, including the fish brains that Katie ever so generously shared with me. Finally Emily patted him on the shoulder, "JJ, finish eating first."

He blinked. "Right. Thank you Emily."

My brain, suddenly inspired by its distant and scaly relative, asked me if I should thank her too.

* * *

"And?" I pressed. "Where do we go from the station?"

Will rolled her eyes in a bad impression of me. "It's a mountain in the middle of town. It's like, really tall, and kind of hard to miss."

JJ added, "If you stand there long enough, people will start offering you rides, by taxi, rickshaw, donkey cart, tricycle, pedicab, motorcycle..."

"JJ!" I interrupted.

"... well, you get the picture."

He had previously tried to explain exactly what it was the two of them had to go take care of, but they'd only gotten as far as "registration" and "file" and "transfer" before they'd lost me amongst all the red tape. So this left the three of us to go climb Mount... something.

"Tai," Emily reminded me.

"Thai? Why would anybody name a mountain after shrimp soup?"

"Let's go," yelled Katie, already halfway out the parking lot. "Will said they'd meet us at the peak a bit later."

It took us about four hours to make the whole fucking climb up, and we kept passing tanned, muscular local workers with shoulder poles loaded with cargo, zigzagging their way up the steps. Emily told us that's how the restaurants, hotels and shops on the peak got their supplies. She kept talking about the various historic sights and 6000 year old stairs while Katie kept shooting me looks that screamed, _who the fuck is this person and where did she take my sister?_

I only shrugged, I'd only known Emily for a week, how was I supposed to know that acting like a walking encyclopedia wasn't her usual state?

_But_, persisted my brain, _if that's the case, what's with these strange sensations?  
_  
No, I told it sternly, I'm not going to talk about that.

_You'll have to sooner or later_, it continued. _What are you going to do to shut me up for the next three months then? Knock me unconscious?  
_  
"You're being exceptionally annoying today," I said.

Emily looked hurt.

Jesus, I thought, did I actually say that out loud? "Not you," I added weakly towards her direction. She didn't seem to hear.

My mad internal argument was disrupted by the fact that we had just reached the top. Stretching out my back and trying to gauge exactly how sore I'd be the next day, I made my way up a large rock and sat there pretending to look at the scenery. All in the name of avoiding awkward situations with a certain Emily Fitch.

I sighed. Thankfully attacks of naked Emily's had become fewer and further between. They had been replaced by eruptions of sappy emotion thingys that led to sappy thoughts that tried to lead to sappy actions. It had been all I could do to keep the final under control every since Qufu.

I noticed a bunch of people seemingly dancing around a large stone tablet with Chinese characters on it.

"What does that say?" I asked nobody in particular.

"Something like, the most revered of the five, erm, mountains? Something... mountains," said Katie, appearing from nowhere. Disgruntled at the look on my face, "What? Emily mentioned it on the way up."

"Uh-huh. Why don't they just write 'Mount Tai' and be done with it?"

"I guess it'd be disrespectful. Like, what's your Mum's name?"

"Gina."

"Right, so you call her Mum instead of Gina Campbell. Just imagine it, you yelling, Gina Campbell, the milkman wants you!"

"That actually happened once with one of her strays, it's a really funny story... Hey isn't that Will?"

It was. We scooted down the rock, Katie looking rather like a crab.

"How did you get up here so fast?" I demanded.

She yawned. "We took the tram. Bored the bloody shit out of me too, an hour and a half of nothing but fog and -"

"And nobody told us there was a fucking tram?" yelled Katie shrilly.

After Katie eventually stopped trying to kill her, Will managed to explain that Emily wanted to see all the historical sights on the way up. She just assumed that it was what the rest of us wanted too.

"Where is Emily anyway?" I asked.

"Left her with JJ. He's a bit down, and she looked like she could get him to talk."

* * *

I went looking for Emily with a Coke as a peace offering of sorts. The rocks on the top of the peak were dusty when dry and muddy when wet, not really making for good traction. I spotted her finally, a speck of red among an ocean of black, shining in the sun like a beacon. Stumbled, had to look down at where the fuck I was stepping so I didn't fall into a crevice or something.

Looked back up again, just in time to see JJ drape an arm over Emily's shoulder.

"Fuck," I said out loud, making a few elderly Chinese people look at me funny.

What was he doing? More importantly, what was she thinking? Were they... no way, that wasn't possible. Was it?

I had to stop watching before my head exploded. Ducking behind a giant stone tablet, I wrung open the lid and downed half the fizzy liquid in several gulps.

_Ready to have that conversation now?_ asked my brain smugly.

.

.

**A/N:** Yeah we all know nothing's going to happen on that front, so hopefully no one loses any sleep on this not really a cliffy. Hopefully one more update before lil' old me heads into (up to?) Tibet for two weeks. You know, Tibet, land of really blue skies and bloody little internet? But since life is kinda hectic at the moment, I'm telling y'all now just in case. Yeah, you don't really expect me to be able to write about it without ever being there, do you...


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N:** Hey there! No, I'm not back from Tibet. I just had a few afternoons with nothing to do and decided to do a bit of writing. I just had to post it today because I'll be heading into the mountains for some camping in the middle of nowhere. Sorry if it's a bit rough, I'll do some re-reading when I get back in Lhasa in a few days.

**Disclaimer:** Nope, not mine, even if I asked Buddha for it yesterday.

* * *

**Chapter 8**

_Emily_

JJ gave me a depressed look.

"What's up?" I asked.

"I have Asperger's," he replied.

Various melodramatic hospital soaps ran through my mind. "What's that? And is it serious?"

He sighed, and recited, "Asperger's syndrome is an autism spectrum disorder that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. I've had it all my life, it doesn't kill you, just makes you a mong."

Come to think of it, he did seem to have all of those. "Oh," was all I could say.

Beat. "You're not a mong," I added hopefully.

He huffed. "That wasn't convincing at all. See normally I can't even tell if someone is lying, unless it's logically incorrect. But me not being a mong is rationally impossible because the very definition of Asperger's includes significant difficulties in social interaction and that is exactly why-"

"JJ! You're not a mong, because I mean it, ok?"

He sighed and sat down on a rock. I joined him.

"Why now?" I persisted.

"What?"

"You didn't seem to be bothered the last few days. So what happened?"

"Registration."

"And?"

"It was written in the record, you see, really big. There was this old lady in the back of the office, who probably didn't know that I could understand her, that kept talking about how she used to know this kid with Asperger's and how he turned out like a burden to society and should've been locked up long ago..."

"That's not true," I interrupted. "You're smart, you're good at things, you even learned Chinese, for fuck's sake."

He didn't look convinced. "You don't know me, I used to be exactly like she was talking about."

"What changed?"

"Well, Chinese kids were just so naturally weird, I suppose, that I didn't stand out anymore."

"So what it is then? The thing that decides whether you're normal or not?" I asked, mostly myself.

"I guess it's mostly actions," he replied, after a long pause. "And appearances. They don't care what's inside, just what gets out."

"Just what gets out," I repeated sadly. The story of my life then.

"I think I'm gay," I eventually blurted out.

"Really?" asked JJ. "That's good. I think. Is that good?"

I shook my head. "It might be, but right now it sucks."

We sat for a while, looking at the hills and mountains rolling into the distance.

"Emily?" JJ suddenly asked. "What is it that you want the most?"

Blonde hair and blue eyes flashed across my mind, but I pushed it down. What else then? "Acceptance? I guess. For what's inside."

JJ gave me an awkward shoulder-hug. "The only way for that to happen is to let it out."

* * *

Naomi had a weird look on her face as we headed into the hotel. She looked like she had just eaten a fly and was torn between bursting into tears and being relieved that it was over with. I glanced at her wistfully, had to remind myself she thought I was, quote, exceptionally annoying, and proceeded to ignore her.

JJ had left morosely for his room on another floor. Will looked at me, and then Naomi, and then at me again, as if she was trying to find a way out of a difficult chemistry exam.

"Right. Two rooms," she seemed to be satisfied with her solution, "I'm going to be taking this one over here with Katiekins," Katie opened her mouth to protest but was silenced into a muffled "ow!" with a pinch to the arm, "because the view is better! Come on, Katie," pretty much pulled her inside by force, and closed the door with a loud slam.

Leaving the two of us standing in the corridor with our stuff. Deafening silence.

Naomi shifted behind me. "Well, your sister was pretty much swept off her feet. A bit cartoonish, wouldn't you say, the way she was totally off the ground for a second there? Hey, where are you going?"

I'd turned, tugged my bags into the adjoining room huffily, and took the bed by the window. Ignoring the steady gaze I could feel drilling holes into the back of my head, I kicked off my shoes and made a dive for the covers, wrapping myself up like a cocoon. Yes I fucking _hid_.

I heard Naomi shuffling behind me. "Y'know, you'll suffocate like that. Research shows that people can actually get brain damage sleeping with their heads in the covers. We wouldn't want that would we, what with the awesome trip in front of you and awesome life and whatever awesome thing you've got going on with JJ -"

I poked my head out in spite of myself. "What JJ?"

She waved her arms around randomly. "The one downstairs? Average looking, curly hair, gets locked on?"

"What about him?"

She looked at me quizzically. "Well, I thought you and him... had... erm..." she trailed off and let her gaze drift elsewhere.

I stared at her in silence. "Why would you care if there was?"

"I don't," she muttered irritably, more to herself than to me. "Why does it matter what I think? Besides, what happened to undetermined?"

I felt myself flare up. She was the one being all hot and cold, not me. "Yeah well if I were that determined why the fuck would I have to run from my family?"

She snapped back towards me. "You're running?" she asked, her eyes narrowing.

"What's it to you anyway?" I replied hotly, jumping up from the bed and not caring I was barefoot on the cold floor.

We glared at each other for another second. I could almost see the gears in her head turning as she looked for a comeback. My heart suddenly started pounding as I realized what I had just asked. No! I wanted to yell. I'm not asking you to define us, whatever us is. Just give me... something.

After a long moment, she licked her lips and opened her mouth. I tried not to let my brain run too far into the gutter as I awaited her answer.

The door opened with a loud _BANG _as Katie kicked open the door, her mouth opening into a round O as she saw us standing off.

"How was I supposed to know you didn't lock the door? I was just knocking," she replied indignantly in response to our searing glares. I noticed my sister looked a bit flustered.

"Knocking with your feet?" Naomi stuttered.

"I need a drink, you two coming? And Emsy, keep your shoes on for fuck's sake. You look like a fucking Neanderthal."

* * *

It was a strange place to get drinks by any standard. The place seemed to be a family clubhouse by day, with kiddie slides and swings in the back, one of those inflatable pools filled with colourful plastic balls in the front. The walls were lined with plump orange plastic chairs that turned purple in the flashing blue lights and the dance floor had cartoon sheep painted onto the floorboards.

The loud music was pounding through the pub and inside my head as we downed shot after shot of nameless alcohol at a green table. Will stared out the window. JJ fiddled with his orange juice and stared at the other side of the room. Naomi and I stared at our drinks. Katie took stared at each of us in turn. The thick silence settled like a cloud.

Katie finally decided she'd had enough. "JJ, if you want to meet her so much, just go up and talk to her."

"What? No! I can't... She won't... It doesn't..."

She dragged him up by the arm and gave him a shove. "Go! And don't come back until you have her number."

Naomi's gaze followed him across the room, through the crowd, to a small blonde girl sitting at the bar. He looked completely terrified.

"Lil' JJ is growing up," Will remarked, her face still firmly glued to the window.

"He's never had a girlfriend," I said. It was more a statement than a question.

"New and shiny as they come."

Naomi rolled her eyes and stood up, walking out the door into the backyard with all the dignity someone slightly tipsy could muster. "All this love in the air is making me nauseous," she told us over her shoulder.

"I'll get some more drinks," Will sighed. "Looks like we can all use it."

Leaving me and Katie looking at each other.

"What's up?" we asked at the same time.

"Ugh, I hate it when that happens!" exclaimed my sister. "You first, I existed before you."

I was too annoyed to tell her that was a very metaphysical argument.

"Nothing," I replied sulkily.

She crossed her arms and tried to look pissed off. The big bad wolf grinning over her shoulder damaged the effect somewhat.

"Fine," she concluded. "You know you can never keep things from me for more than 10 minutes."

"That's not true," I mumbled, and walked away, with no idea where to go. I couldn't really follow Naomi, that'd look desperate, but where else was there?

I spotted Will trying to weave her way through the crowd with her arms full of bottles, with seemingly a lot of difficulty, and coming in my direction.

"Emily, a hand?" she yelled hopefully.

I nicked the bottle of vodka sticking out the top of the pile. "Sorry, next time," I hollered back, leaving her looking helpless among the sea of people.

"How the fuck are we supposed to drink all the rest of this without vodka?" her voice followed me out the door, but she sounded more amused than anything else. I decided to ignore her. More pressing issues on my mind and all that.

I spotted Naomi sitting on the bar under the slide, with a glowing fag in her hand. Her eyes locked with mine.

I waved the bottle around as if it explained all the mysteries of the world.

"Is that vodka?" she asked in a small voice. I nodded.

She straightened ever so slightly. "Hand it over then."

We took turns taking swigs from the bottle, me relishing the familiar burn working down my throat and traveling to my fingers.

"So, JJ," I began.

She grinned sheepishly. "Yeah, sorry 'bout that. He's still a twat though."

"Takes one to know one."

"You'd say."

"Wanna go on the slide?"

She gawked. "Is it even as tall as you are?"

"Spoilsport."

It was indeed a rather short slide, so after several unsuccessful trips up and down, we ended up lying awkwardly on opposite sides at top of it, looking at the stars spin.

"Ems?" she asked drowsily.

"Hmm?"

"I don't mean to."

"Mean to what?"

"Be all back and forth."

"You don't?" I asked sarcastically.

"I don't. It just freaks me out a bit, since I want to do all these really strange things with you around."

I sat up, facing her. "Strange as in?"

She mirrored my actions. "It's kind of a long story, since having an old hippy for a mother doesn't instill a sense of what is socially acceptable, but I guess it's almost universal for the Western world that it's fuzzy if what I want is widely -"

"Naomi," I interrupted. "You're babbling."

I could see her blush, even in the dim light. Music traveled from inside, sounding other-worldly mixed with the calls of grasshoppers. She scooted closer.

"I guess what I'm trying to say is..."

We looked at each other of a long moment. Then, before I could register what she was doing, Naomi had wrapped a slender arm behind my neck and pressed her lips to mine.

Fireworks went off in my head, and across the globe, crowds erupted in loud applause and celebration. Dancing and chanting ensued, tens of thousands of voices cheered me on. Fucking _goal!_ because Naomi fucking Campbell was kissing me. She was kissing me.

And I was kissing her right back.

.

.

* * *

**A/N:** There, satisfied? Finally a bit of real Naomily.

Next update will probably take another two weeks or so, but it will happen eventually, patience is a virtue, people.

Much love, your 4000m altitude, very sunburnt writer.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N: **Tibet is an awesome place. Especially if you're into photography like I am.

**Disclaimer:** Not mine, but I'll probably die if I don't write about it.

* * *

**Chapter 9**

_Katie_

I watched JJ across the room trying awkwardly to talk to the little blonde girl. Will plopped a strangely coloured concoction in front of me.

"What is that?" I asked.

She shrugged. "It's got alcohol in it."

I picked it up and drank, came up for air spluttering. "What the fuck?"

"Po...pome something fruit juice, soda and vodka."

I grimaced and reached for the vodka. "Just gimme the bottle."

"Katie," she warned.

I grabbed it. "Don't Katie me, Will. I know what I'm doing and you're not my -"

Something caught my eye from outside. Emily and the blonde were sitting outside at the top of the kiddie slide. I was about to go outside and tell them that was fucking embarrassing when said blonde bitch reached over and kissed my sister. My sister!

I was on my feet in a second and storming through the crowd. I was vaguely aware of people parting to either side, clearing my path. What can I say? I'm fucking scary. I was _so _going to kill both of them.

And suddenly I was off the ground, being half carried half dragged in the opposite direction. I elbowed and kicked whoever it was, getting a grunt or two but they didn't put me down. Will's voice said from somewhere in space, "I'm not going to let the fuck go, Katiekins, so can you stop," grunt, "hitting me right now?"

I was dumped unceremoniously into the ball pool outside, Will scowling at me and rubbing her ribs. "Fucking OW. You Fitches really pack a punch for pound don't ya?"

"She was kissing my sister!" I exploded and tried to get up, failing utterly.

"So? Does Emily go around smacking boys in the nose when they snog you?"

"My sister is not gay!"

"How do you know that?"

"That's fucking disgusting! She can't be like -"

I only realized too late what I was saying.

"And how can you be sure of that, homophobic bitch?"

I felt myself deflate like a ruptured balloon. As JJ would say, oh bobbins. What the fuck is a bobbin anyway?

"Didn't mean you," I muttered at a purple plastic ball, glumly. "The blonde bitch still has it coming, fucking lezza." It ignored me.

Will decided I was finished trying to hit people, and sank, still panting a bit, into the pool beside me. She lay back, with only knees and head protruding above the surface, and stared upwards. Reminded me of a crocodile.

I looked up. There really were a shitload of stars. Never noticed them that much before, stargazing and such romantic stuff was Emily's field. Not that boys haven't tried, but somehow it always happened to be cloudy. I glanced over at Will, who had tugged out a fag and was rummaging her pockets for her lighter.

"Jesus, don't you people ever give it a rest?" I asked exasperated.

She looked at me, then returned the cigarette to the pack silently and gave me a massive yawn.

"What's it like being gay?" I asked.

She shrugged. "What's it like being human?"

"Are you saying you're not?"

"Different for everybody. And I've had my doubts, in case you were wondering."

I snorted in a most unladylike way. "You would. And I'm still pissed at you."

"I know."

* * *

Will soon insisted we go help JJ out, though it didn't look like he needed help at all. I only realized a bit too late that all the animated chatting was a diversion to keep me away from Emily and Naomi, and by the time I went to look for them they had disappeared in the sea of swaying bodies jumping around on wide-eyed retarded-looking cartoon creatures.

I eventually managed to corner Naomi before the night was over. "You fucking kissed my sister," I accused in a threatening voice, with my best death glare.

She responded with a giddy grin. "Katiekins!" she exclaimed drunkenly. "You 'ave nice foreheads!"

Feeling like Fluffy the three-headed dog, I persevered. "What the fuck was going through your twattish peroxide brain?"

She saluted me with her bottle of whiskey, the bit of liquid swishing around the bottom. "Yeah, awesome innit?" She stumbled, steadied herself against the wall, and seemed to stop to think. I waited for my words to register. Her face lit up.

"Balls!" she bellowed gleefully, and skipped crookedly away towards the front.

I rolled my eyes. How the crack am I supposed to threaten somebody who's too fucking drunk to understand? And what the hell was she on? And, the horrifying thought suddenly occurred to me, did that mean that Emily was on it too?

As if the universe had read my mind, Emily appeared right then and there with the same shiteating grin extending from ear to ear. She handed me something small and white, clapped me twice (painfully) on the shoulder, and hopped merrily away. I squinted at the object, discovering it to be a lip balm container that rattled when I shook it. It was filled with small nondescript pills that struck me as very, very evil.

"What the fuck?" I demanded back at the table, to no one in particular.

"Oh bollocks," replied JJ in way of explanation. "I used to take those last year, but threw them out because they made me way too hyperactive for my own good. What are they doing here? I remember I disposed them in the back of my desk."

Will suddenly looked extremely guilty.

"We," concluded the girl, whose name was Lara, "needed to get pissed."

* * *

The first thing I realized when I woke up the next morning was that it was far too early to be awake. The second thing was that I was on the floor.

"Fuuuuuuuck," I managed to moan.

I was vaguely aware of some shuffling to my right, and something warm, soft and heavy was dumped on my head. By the time I had freed myself of its clutches and discovered it to be a huge blanket, Will had staggered to her feet and was looking at me. At least I think she was looking at me, there might have been a baby kangaroo sitting near my head, my brain was too fuzzy to be sure.

"Unless you want to get up," she croaked, and stretched herself out with difficulty.

I managed to flop myself back onto the bed, and listened absently to the sound of showering as I continued to keep my eyes firmly shut and tried to go back to sleep. I guess I succeeded because the next thing I knew Will was trying to tug me up by an ankle and saying in a panicked but still hungover voice, "Get up or we'll miss the free breakfast. Go shower, I'll get the others."

Slowly, like liquid from a leaky tap, the events of the previous of the night trickled back into my consciousness. There were various drinks, some vicious small pills, music, coloured balls, Naomi and Emily kissing, starry skies...

Wait a second. Naomi and Emily kissing?

I was up like a released spring, which my brain did not respond well to at all. "Fuuuuuuuuck," I groaned again, somehow finding myself on the floorboards. Again. Figuring I was in no shape to do any confronting right now, lezza bitch or no lezza bitch, I headed for the shower.

Will was already in the hall, pounding on the door on the opposite side. "Naomi, Emily," she was yelling hoarsely. "We'll miss breakfast, and we've still got the mountain to get down of."

I managed to catch Naomi's voice saying grumpily, "That was grammatically wrong in three places," through the door before I turned on the water.

Breakfast was a, well, basin of plain white broth with an assortment of pickled vegetables to go with it. The four of us ate in silence, too hungover to be able to process conversation. I was a full bowl in before I felt up to talking coherently about anything.

Just as I was about to open my mouth, Emily asked sleepily, "JJ's going back to Zhengzhou today?"

Will had put a full cube of red bean curd into her broth, turning it a dull pink. She stirred it vigorously. "I think so, he mentioned some summer project he has to get into. Lara's going in the same direction, talk about fate."

Emily grinned back. "They do seem rather well matched."

"People aren't car parts, Ems," replied Naomi, stifling a yawn. "The whole well matched thing is a bit overrated."

I opened my mouth.

"So what about us?" asked Emily, picking at what looked suspiciously like a red cabbage leaf.

"We could go with, save the train fare. Or we could head south straight to Shanghai, spend some quality time with tiny little towns with ancient architecture and fuckloads of water."

Emily's eyes lit up at the mention of smelly old buildings. No contest.

I finally managed to get a word in. "What were you two doing last night?"

The two of them stared at me as if I had grown spikes all over my face. "We were sleeping. Weren't you?"

* * *

The four of us were cramped uncomfortably into tiny train seats between the double glass windows and some scruffy middle-aged workers who were standing in the aisle with bulgy potato sacks the size of people. We were on our way to Shanghai, on the slowest fucking train in the universe, and it would take us a good 14 hours to get there.

I huffed a final time at that thought and death glared at Will. She flinched from its burning heat, I guess, and hid her head further into the book she was reading. "Not my fault China's really big," she muttered. "We should be glad there were seats at all. Believe me, it could've been much, much worse."

Naomi took a peek at Will's book. "You're reading a book on postmodernism?" she asked incredulously.

"Uh, yeah, so?"

"Aren't postmodernists just a bunch of mouthy wankers that take shit apart and don't know how to build anything of their own?"

"That's the point. Would you trust a demolition crew with your new house? Makes for a pretty disagreeable demolition crew though."

Emily put down her own book and jumped in. "Strikes me as pointless, why take stuff apart just to put them back together?"

Naomi shrugged. "I get her point, out with the old kind of thing. But aimless destruction is almost as bad as no change at all."

Will rubbed her nose and frowned. "Give me an example."

I tuned them out and stared out the window at the sun setting over nondescript hills, crooked ridges, and bent farmers. I felt slightly drained. I squinted my eyes up and scolded myself. Katie Fitch is never drained. Ever. What the fuck was wrong with me?

I looked at the three of them gabbing animatedly about something I had no hope of interrupting. I caught Naomi talking really fast about "government hierarchies" and "self-important arseholes" while Will cheerfully gave information on "mindfucks", "public narratives" and "a false sense of history". I had no idea what Emily was going on about. That's when suddenly it hit me. I was outnumbered and surrounded.

Oh fuck.

During a lull in their indeterminable babble, I asked matter-of-factly, "Are you two together now?"

They turned red. If there were a sport called synchronized blushing, they'd be Olympians.

"We haven't talked about it," mumbled my sister.

I raised an eyebrow at Naomi. She grimaced. The train slowed, rumbled, and lurched to a stop. "I need some air," I announced.

Though, as I stood in the twilight on the platform of an unbelievably shitty town station, I wondered if I didn't need a plane ticket as well. Emily seemed to be totally fine on her own, and it wasn't like anyone needed me here. I didn't really want to see the rest of this unbelievably shitty country in particular either.

The train whistled, so I collected myself together best I could and headed back. People stared at me through the windows. Some kid pointed at me and yelled loudly. Yeah, yeah, everybody look at the useless English girl in the really short skirt. For fuck's sake.

The door was fucking locked.

The fucking train chose that moment to start moving. Away they went, all those fucking people that didn't need me.

OH FUCK.

I waited until the train was out of earshot to fish my cellphone out of my shirt pocket (thank fuck I'd brought it out with me) and call Will. She took forever to pick up.

"Where the fuck are you?" she demanded. Jesus, somebody could be loud when they wanted to.

"I got fucking left behind."

A shocked silence. "Fuck!" she exclaimed. "Shit! Fucking shitting -"

"You done?" I interrupted.

Another shocked silence. "Yeah. Sorry."

I exhaled hard. The wind blew at my hair. A star twinkled at me.

"What the fuck do I do now?"

.

.

* * *

**A/N:** When I started writing this fic, I had no idea I was going write from Katie's POV. So when she came up to me last week and told me, "This chapter will be about me, else I'll kick you in the bollocks," I was pretty astonished. (Not like I had any of those to begin with.) But who am I to say no? Not sure I did her justice, but all things happen for a reason. You'll see.


	10. Chapter 10

**A/N:** Back on track, hopefully. On to Shanghai this chapter...

**Disclaimer: **Not mine, at least not since I last checked.

* * *

**Chapter 10**  
_Naomi_

"Oh," said Emily, as her lips left mine.

I blinked several times, trying to keep my head from exploding. I noticed Emily doing the same thing.

We burst out laughing. "Oh," I grinned nervously. "Well?"

"I have no idea what to say," she replied, her face completely open.

I racked my brain for something to say. The lip balm container causing slight discomfort in my pocket prodded gently. "That's alright. Want to get pissed then?"

"OK."

Most of the rest of the night was more a blur of pulsating colours than anything else. I seem to remember dancing in the middle of the backyard, dancing on top of some big rock to a cosmic soundtrack, some more kissing behind bushes, and not really much else.

I found us sitting by the wall as the pills slowly wore off, watching the smoke curl up from the small glowing sticks between our fingers, which for some reason was extremely interesting. The wind whistled around us, and we cuddled into each other.

"Hey," Emily said softly. "You have a Sailor Moon necklace."

I bristled slightly. I was going to get laughed at. "And the fact that you recognize it?"

She didn't laugh. "Just realized how much I still don't know about you."

And me about her. Suddenly, questions were running around my head like rampage bunnies.

"Why China?" I asked.

"What?"

"Why did you decide to visit China? So many places around the world to choose from."

She smirked up at me. "Asia is one of the places I can tell my mother I don't have internet when I actually do."

"Huh. Your mother, that's why you're running?"

"Not really."

"I'm confused."

"So am I." She closed her eyes and tried to bury herself in my jacket. "Why are you here?"

"It's just..." I paused. "Really fucking far away? Does that count as a reason?"

"I guess."

"I was just pissed with the world. All that shit and noise. Get really far from it."

"Has it gotten any quieter here?"

Somebody chose that moment to stumble outdoors and start singing drunkenly and off-key towards the moon.

"Slightly." We chuckled.

"Are you cold?" she asked.

"What do you think?"

"Want to go back?"

"Probably should anyway. Can you get up?"

"Worth a try."

We made it back into our room in one piece (each), giggling all the way. Then I closed the door softly behind us, and the relaxed, happy mood evaporated into the darkness like water drops under a hair-dryer. Emily sat on her bed and pulled off her shoes. I took off my jacket. We hadn't bothered to turn on any lights, so we sat there, staring at each other's outlines in the moonlight, not knowing what to do.

"What do you wanna do now?" I blurted. Slapped myself mentally in the back of the head.

"I think it'd normally be expected that we take our clothes off and go to sleep."

It was like a fire had been lit under me. Wrong thing to say, Ems. "Didn't you forget the putting on pajamas part?" I asked weakly, struggling quite unsuccessfully to get the burning sensations under control.

There was a short silence. "I don't... wear pajamas."

I swear I watched my sanity prance around the room and out the window with a graceful leap. Nice knowing you, probably won't be seeing you around. Fuck, is she doing this on purpose?

I plopped myself onto bed, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried to think of completely irrelevant things. Microscopes. Cells. Leaves. Trees. Kissing Emily under trees, no, wrong direction, start over. Vitamin B. Drives away mosquitoes. Who like skin. Touching Emily's skin - oh fuck no, start over-

"Naoms?" she interrupted my frenzied game of association. "You asleep?"

If she knew how far I was from it.

"Yes- I mean, no, haven't done the taking clothes off part yet have I."

"Right."

"Right."

I kicked off my shoes and socks and escaped to brush my teeth. When I got back, all I could see was the back of her head. Seemed I was looking at that view quite a bit. I changed and took my own bed. It was big. It was empty.

It was rather sleep-inducing.

* * *

It was already noon when we got to Shanghai. It gave me back some of the tacky modern feel I had been missing. No, that's probably not right. Although there's no way SH is more metropolitan than HK, I felt like I had been living in the middle of history for the last week. Any familiarity was good.

We took the metro out of the train station. I stared a bit at the map while we were waiting - it looked like a giant spider with long, twisted legs. Evil looking.

"We should send Katie her stuff," Emily was saying. She looked worried.

I patted her on the knee. "I'm sure she's able to survive a few days without her moisture replenishing masks."

"But she said -"

"We'll post it once we get there. It's not like carrying her half a ton of luggage around is fun for us either."

"Where are we going again?"

I flipped through my notebook. "Youth Hostel at People's Square. What's People's Square?"

"Only the busiest place in Shanghai," said Will on my other side.

In contrast, however, the hostel itself was in a narrow alley that lost the sound of traffic quickly as we walked. We eventually reached a heavy wooden door with small mystical stone creatures on both sides.

"Wow," I heard myself saying.

I'd thought, shitty youth hostel, right? What I was looking at was a small two-story building made of grayish bricks. A stream ran through the courtyard under a wooden bridge, and bamboo lined the walls. Several Chinese kids our age were sitting on stone benches laughing loudly, and a tiny lady in an apron was sweeping the leaves from the front porch. She gave us a friendly smile and pointed inside.

The halls were lit up with red lanterns. Will glared at them and we filed into the room at the end of the hall.

"This whole place gives me the wigs," she announced.

"Really?" Emily said, almost hidden behind her backpack. "I think it's charming."

Will huffed. "Right. I'm the only one here who knows anything about evil Chinese ghosts."

"Well, what do you do to chase them away?" I asked.

"You put on red things and chant Taoist... stuff."

"See? You know to do that already. Nothing to be afraid of."

Will gave me an annoyed look and left, muttering about post offices and delivery companies.

* * *

We spent the afternoon wandering around the Bund, looking at old bank buildings and mocking ridiculous looking modern sculptures. Will called, said Katie's stuff had been posted and that she wouldn't be joining us, something about going into crazy photographer mode and being utterly boring. By dusk, Emily and I were totally exhausted, and ended up sitting on the bank of the river, surrounded by highly annoying tourist families.

"Ems," I ventured. "There's a rainbow elephant in the virtual room."

"What? Where? I don't see ...oh. That one."

A tugboat chugged glumly across our view.

She wrinkled her nose. "Can we not have this long and meaningful conversation now? I'm knackered, and it kind of stinks here."

I fidgeted. I had been dancing around the topic as well. Just figured it should be in the same category as laundry and school assemblies, stuff that should be done and gotten over with.

"Do you want to go somewhere else then?"

"No."

I huffed. In other circles, I was widely known as Naomi-of-little-patience-and-no-compassion-who-doesn't-socialize, or cold-hearted bitch for short. Alright then. Temporary and loosely unconnected was fine with me.

Only it fucking wasn't. Bugger this.

"Coffee it is then," I concluded, tugged Emily up and headed for a cafe I'd spotted earlier. It was a quiet little place, surrounded by trees and filled with shelves loaded with books. I talked pointedly about other things, politics, geography, even my mother's favourite sushi. Emily stared into her cup and chatted halfheartedly. We eventually drifted into an annoyed silence, on my part at least, and listened to unfamiliar Chinese pop songs.

"So," she said to the table. "The elephant."

"What about it?"

"I dunno. What do people usually do with elephants anyway?"

"Send them to Africa."

"Naomi..."

"Yes Emily?"

She sighed. "You know what, I'm done avoiding it. It's not like it'll go away if we don't talk about it."

"It might," I said darkly.

"Not like that. I mean, this thing that we're not talking about, we should talk about. It, I mean."

"I agree."

"So let's, you know, talk."

"I'm under the impression that that's what we're doing."

"Yeah, only not really talking about it." She sighed. "I'm sorry for being all runny earlier. Can you drop the act and just talk to me?"

I nearly smiled at that. Emily the nose.

"OK."

"OK."

A long silence.

"Naomi," she said eventually, "I thought talking about it involved, you know, actual talking."

"There we go again. Talking about it without actually talking about it."

"Let's start with this. What is It?"

"It is this... thing, between you and me that feels a bit like caramel candy. The more we fight it, the more we get stuck."

"Is it that simple? I mean, it'd be simple if it only involved, you know, us."

"I'm not planning on a threesome, if that's what you're asking."

"No!" she said too quickly. "No, just, what does it say about us?"

Oh, so that's what she was worried about.

"I thought we were away from home. Isn't freedom what traveling is all about? Or are you worried about Katie?"

"No," Emily said in a small voice. Bulls-eye Naomi.

"We can worry about her when she, you know, actually gets here."

She picked at the tablecloth. "What do you think?"

"I thought," I paused. I've never been good with feelings of any kind, much less this kind. Much less of this intensity. I was also known as Naomi-who-is-not-in-touch-with-her-feelings, which can also be shortened into cold-hearted bitch. I cleared my throat and started again. "I thought we kinda made that part clear."

She fiddled with her spoon, making tickling sounds with her cup. "You, erm..."

I nodded and looked elsewhere. "I like you. I think." I couldn't believe I'd just said that. She continued to tinkle. "It'd be really nice if you could just, you know, actually say things out loud."

Emily looked at me finally. "I think I like you too."

I let out a breath I didn't even realize I was holding. "Right. Then we can worry about the execution details later."

* * *

Will was curled up in a corner frowning into her laptop. "They've got wifi," she told me without looking up.

"I should send Effy some pictures," I told Emily.

"Can I see?"

We ended up with my laptop in my bunk, laughing at the assortment of pictures I'd taken that were so bad they were hilarious. There was the one of JJ with a crab leg dangling out of his mouth, a tree growing out of Will's head, Katie going after JJ with a broom. And I only just realized how many of the pictures were of Emily.

"I hate taking pictures," she pouted.

"You won't by the time I learn to actually use a camera," I replied. "I, Naomi Campbell," I grinned, "make it the purpose of the following three months to take as many beautiful pictures of Emily Fitch as possible."

"Don't make promises you can't keep, Naomikins," Will teased from the other side of the room. "I'd be surprised if you learn to light properly in three months." She was promptly hit over the head with a pillow.

"Nice shot," I told Ems.

"Watch and learn," she smirked.

.

.

.

**A/N: **Comments? Anybody? I had to watch 306 again to write this one. I don't think we're totally in the green yet, but they're getting there.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11****  
**_Katie_

The owner of the tiny hotel spoke English. Well, you could say that she spoke it, but whether anyone understood her was another matter.

She was a plump middle-aged woman, in a printed floral shirt and a horrid purple apron, talking in some rapidfire Chinese dialect at a shriveled-looking old guy I assumed was her husband. Then she turned to me, gave me this huge motherly smile somewhat like a bonfire (something that my own mother doesn't give people at all), and told me seriously, "No one people room, two people four room, one people big room. Ah!", and clapped her hands together, "Ingo girl big room, talk Ingo!"

I was about to ask what the fuck Ingo was when she trooped off up the stairs, babbling off in what I guess she thought was English and I couldn't understand a word of. Led me into a large empty room with rugs and blankets rolled up along the wall. One bed was made already near the wall, with a cheerful spotted sack dumped in the corner. The plump eggplant woman rolled out another bed and then left me to my own devices.

I took a seat near the window and stared into the emptiness of the night outside. It had started raining just after I had found this place, a family hotel roughly the size of a shoe, and the rain was pattering rather loudly against the glass. I went through my pockets again, double checking I had everything on me. Not that it amounted to a lot. I had a phone, a wad of cash in my pockets, and a small bag holding all my documents, Ipod, lip balm, eyeliner, a pen that leaked out the side and a stupid-looking memo pad that Emily had given me in Hong Kong. That was it. No clothes, no shampoo or shower gel, not even a fucking towel.

It made me want to go beat the crap out of some fuck ugly demon or something, but that would mess up my nails, and I didn't even have a nail file on me.

I sighed and put my stuff away securely again. I'd turned off my phone after getting the owner to text the address of this place to Will, supposedly to save the battery since I wouldn't get my charger until my bag got here. (There had been a lot of gesturing and yelling before, swearing at myself for my stupidity, it'd occurred to me to call Will and get her to explain the concept.) Still, the peace and quiet seemed rather more enticing than energy conserving right now.

It seemed like a century since I had been anywhere remotely modern, with anyone to talk to. Which brought me back to that platform...

_"You done?" I interrupted._

_A shocked silence. "Yeah. Sorry."_

_"What the fuck do I do now?"_

_"Could you maybe get on the next train? Or we could just go back and get you. Or maybe you could-"_

_No, I thought. No, that wouldn't be right. And who knows, this could be a chance._

_"You know what, I like this place," I lied. "I think I'm going to stay for a bit. Could you mail my bags over or something?"_

_"What? That's not..." she started, then seemed to realize something. "Erm, yeah... You wanna talk to Emily then?"_

_"Ok."_

_A bit of rustling and muffled talking._

_"Katie?" asked Emily, sounding concerned. It made me feel a tad guilty for what I was going to say._

_"Emsy, listen, I think I'm going to stay here for a few days, can you post me my stuff when you get to Shanghai?"_

_"What? Why?"_

_"Isn't that kind of obvious?"_

_"I mean, why are you staying there?" And not with me? asked my sister sense, loudly._

_"It's nice and quiet, I'll catch up."_

_Although that made no sense whatsoever._

_"Well, if that's what you want, I guess. Do you need anything else?"_

_I checked my pockets. "Nope, big roll of cash, I'll just buy whatever I can't wait for."_

_"OK."_

_"OK."_

_"Katie?"_

_"Yeah?"_

_"Be careful."_

_"...You too."_

The silence in the room was shattered by the sound of the door being opened violently, and the familiar thump of a backpack being thrown to the ground. I looked around the corner of the flowery screen to see a blonde girl in a tired-looking pink windbreaker wiping the rain off her camera bag with a tissue.

She looked up and caught sight of me. "Whizzer! New people!" she squealed, threw the tissue randomly away into the depths of the universe, and bounded over to me. "I'm Pandora, as in the box, but people call me Panda," she told me seriously. "I'm useless."

That makes two of us, I thought to myself, and stuck out a hand. "Katie," I said, simply relieved to have someone who could speak English around.

"Are you hungry?" she asked abruptly after shaking it, plopping her bag on the ground and taking a seat on the other side of the window.

"Kind of, but the shops were closed," I shrugged. It was more that I was completely terrified to talk to people, but I would probably die before I admitted it to anyone.

"Take this then," she tossed a round, whitish thing at me.

"What is it?" I asked, squeezing it a bit. It was squishy.

"Gluttonous rice ball," she announced. "Don't you love that word? Gluttonous, makes you feel all round."

I wondered why that would be a good thing. "Thanks."

"I'm just really tired of not having anyone to talk to. There was this boy a few days ago in Hangzhou who followed me around but his English was bobbing awful and I think all he wanted to do was surf and turf. So I escaped to this place, it was the last one in the tourist guide, so I figured it's the smallest."

"Is it then?" Just my luck to be stranded in the middle of nowhere.

She nodded enthusiastically. "Yep, isn't that just brill? What are you hiding from?"

I blinked. "I'm not… hiding."

"Oh, everyone's hiding. Aren't you going to eat that?"

I unwrapped the plastic foil and took a bite. It was soft and sweet, and it promptly stuck to my teeth.

"No!" Pandora yelped. "You're supposed to take it all in one mouthful so everything gets glued together. Here, I'll demonstrate." Pulled another one out of her bag and shoved it in her mouth.

At least it shut her up for the next few minutes.

* * *

The next morning, I was downstairs and trying to eat dumplings without scalding myself to death when Pandora skipped by.

"There's a lantern festival this evening, and some boat race thing in the river in the afternoon. You want to go?"

Well, it wasn't like I had anything better to do, I thought. Then I looked down and remembered something. "Do you have any clean socks you could lend me? I'll wash them before I get them back to you."

So there I was, following Pandora's pink jacket around town, and all the time thinking that I didn't get it. I didn't get it. I didn't understand Panda. I didn't understand the place I was visiting. I didn't understand all these strange feelings of being abandoned, literally, in the middle of fucking nowhere. And I didn't get her neon pink socks with yellow hippos on them either.

"Oh look at that fish! Isn't it cute?"

I simply raised an eyebrow mutely, having absolutely nothing to say. What are you supposed to say to someone who thinks greenish whiskered fish are cute? I never, well, I'd never known anyone as weird as Panda.

After some more walking, it suddenly occurred to me that this probably was the root of the problem. I never could be arsed to get to know anyone who wasn't cool. I had my own little circle of friends, who actually knew how to dress themselves, who spoke the same language I did. But out here, strangely enough, my world was now populated with people in overly cheerful prints who talked weird, people in weird ancient clothes who walked around kissing sisters, and... other people who were just plain weird.

Emily had adapted to this world just fine. No, she loved it. Rid of everything she hated back home. Filled with interesting people, exotic places. I'd liked Hong Kong, it was basically an extension of the life I had been living, without the baggage of ex's this way and that, and bankrupt families and shattered ideals. But this.

I huffed at a bridge crossing over yet another canal. It seemed they ran through every vertical street in town. A small, slim boat slid by silently.

The boat race in the afternoon had been a fluke. Half a dozen dilapidated boats had cruised down a dirty river with two burly men on each, paddling furiously. Then some village official had climbed onto a hilltop and droned through a megaphone for half an hour.

So we had left the river, eating our way through town and waiting for dusk so the lanterns would come on. Panda had introduced me to "smelly tofu", which I'd smelled a hundred yards away and thought it was somebody's trash collection or last week's soup. They were, well, much tastier than I had anticipated.

"Don't worry," Panda had assured me, not very reassuringly. "I've only seen one person get sick from these. It was spectacular though."

As the sun went down and the lanterns were lit, we found ourselves in a narrow alley lined with the red glowing things, reflecting blurrily in the large puddles on the ground. Bamboo leaves rustled overhead. A trio of girls were skipping rope at the other end.

Panda was peering inquisitively at one of the lanterns. "There's something written on it. And a picture too."

I maneuvered across several small pools of water to look at it as well. There was a lady with a fan, looking bored, and a guy (or maybe a girl, it was kinda hard to tell), was staring at her. Beside it were lines of Chinese characters that I could only assume was a poem. There was something really interesting about the feel of the painting, so I took a picture of the lantern with my phone so I could ask someone about it someday.

The lanterns turned the town into something else, something it hadn't been by day. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but there was an air of mystery and otherworldiness around it giving me the wigs.

We wandered around until I was so sleepy I thought the river was going to eat me whole, and then headed back to the hotel and slept like the dead.

I was awoken by the owner patting me softly on the arm. I cracked an eye open.

"Big! Bag!" she told me.

They must've been two magic words because I was up and running down the stairs in two seconds, not caring if I looked like Medusa wrapped in a sleeping bag. (The hotel had a spare.)

My backpack was sitting in the lobby, a bit dusty and frayed in some new places, but happy to see me nonetheless.

Back in the room, Panda was up doing her morning exercises to strangely upbeat music.

"Do you wanna see some pictures I took?" she asked, with her arms up in the air like flags on a windy day. "I was in Shangari-la two weeks ago and Tibet before that. Totally bonkers. They have these shaggy cow things that stand in the middle of the road until dogs the size of shopping carts come out and get mad at 'em."

I sat down and peered at the screen, noticing that her laptop had dinosaur stickers all over it.

"Look," she pointed, "that's the Potala Palace. Looking at it gives me the wigglies. And this one's of a cat in Shigatse, it was chasing after a girl while living in a monastery. And I was thinking, is that even allowed? And this one-"

"What's that?" I asked, pointing to another.

Panda clicked it open. Pale white stones and an angry body of water stared back at me, backed by white-capped mountains, and the bluest sky I'd ever seen. "Oh, that's a lake called Namtso. It was bloody cold, made my toes get all locked up. We slept in a tent and dogs were barking at us all night, I wonder if we shouldn't take a red tent next... why are you crying?"

"I'm not," I answered in surprise.

"Well you sure look like it. Maybe you've got some allergy to dust? One of my cousins is, can't stop sneezing around it. Better get away from it then, let's go outside."

I was going to protest, say that I wasn't allergic to anything, when I noticed a drop of water rolling off the tip of my nose.

That's... strange, I thought, and let Panda tug me outside to sit on the bank of the narrow canal running in front of the hotel. "Deep breaths," she instructed calmly. I ignored her, too busy gathering my scattered thoughts and what was left of my self-respect. My vision cleared slowly, as did my brain. Birds chirped. Bells tinkled. The sun shined halfheartedly, making my arms hot. Water flowed.

Although, strangely enough, all I could see was the deep blue of Namtso.

"That lake you were talking about," I said, as casually as possible. "How do you get there?"

"Oh that's easy. It's really close to Lhasa, a four hour drive or so, only two mountains to get over on the way."

As I sat there, the only clear thought I had was that I would absolutely have to get there.

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**A/N:** I'm not happy with this chapter, but after two weeks of agonizing over it decided that if I agonized over it any more, the rest of this fic would never get written. So here it is, best I could do.


	12. Chapter 12

**A/N:** Hey people! I know, it's been a month. Glad to say I'm not dead, at least not yet, just as busy as fuck and writing got pushed down a few places on my priority list. Well, here's the next chapter. Hope it takes you places.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own shit, which everybody probably knows already...

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**Chapter 12**  
_Emily_

She _likes_ me.

I have no idea why I didn't spontaneously combust right there, in the coffee shop. It was like I was walking on clouds all the way back, and strangely enough, I didn't even feel my feet hurting anymore. When she took my hand crossing the street to our hostel, I nearly asked the gods to lead us into a contradiction of reality where this road looped over itself and never ended.

All too soon, though, we were sitting next to each other in the room, and looking at pictures she took. I never thought I was a critical viewer of photography, since all Mum and Dad took were boring "been there, done that" pictures with people in front of a landmark, but Naomi's pictures were shit. Like, real, actual shit.

"I like that one best," I teased her, pointing.

Katie was mid-sentence, mouth open, in the blurry foreground, while JJ and Will seemed to be eating shrubs in the background.

"It doesn't have you in it," she replied.

"Which one is yours?"

She scrolled to the very top of the screen and clicked open the first. It was in Will's tiny flat in Beijing, I was carrying half a ton of groceries, and grinning from ear to ear.

"That smile's too big," I told her.

"There is no such thing," was her answer. She looked at me with a smirk. "Especially on you."

Will gave a fake groan from the other bunk. "Get a room."

"We're in a room," said Naomi.

"Without me in it."

"You could just get out, mate, it's cheaper."

It was the middle of the night before we were done fooling around. Will was in the other end of the hall brushing her teeth, and Naomi was fishing her pajamas from her bag.

We stared at each other for a long moment.

"Erm," I began.

"Uh huh," Naomi agreed.

I swallowed. "I'm not quite sure what we're supposed to do now."

Naomi shrugged, then suddenly blushed furiously. Disposed her shoes at the bottom of the ladder and scrambled up the rungs as if dogs were on her tail. "Night, Ems," she said from somewhere far, far away.

Will came through the door balancing her mug precariously on the bottom of her shampoo in one hand, hot water bottle in the other. "What?" she asked.

"What?" I replied.

She shimmied everything onto the table. "Why are you looking at me at me like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you want to ask me something. Urgently."

"No I don't."

"OK." She zipped herself into her sleeping bag. "Night people."

The room went dark, and I was left with my own thoughts. I was slightly confused as to what should happen in this kind of situation. The kissing had been, well, the kissing, and the hand holding had been nicer than hand holding should have the right to be. Still, it's not every day that two people who (after long and painfully awkward discussion) finally admit they might like each other, and then are stuck in the same room, with beds and sleeping involved, a few hours later.

And what do lesbians do, anyway?

The thought that I knew very little about Naomi struck me again, with a bit more force this time. I had no idea if she had done any of this before, or was just as new to this as I was. Or maybe I should ask Katie? No, that option was quickly scratched out of existence. She'd probably be all, lesbians are lame! Find somebody with a dick! Hadn't she been basically saying that all our lives?

Suddenly Will's phone went off in the darkness. She grumbled, squinted, and picked up.

"What?"

Unintelligible babbling.

"Yes I have to be grumpy, it's 1 in the morning and-"

More agitated babble.

"Fine, fine, just a sec," Will put on a jacket and began to leave the room.

"Is that Katie?" I asked at the back of her head. Something had just struck me as familiar. Maybe the way the phone lisped.

Will opened the door. "No, it's Rah and he's got a hairdryer problem," she replied, and stalked out. Yup, Katie all right.

"What was that about?" asked Naomi, poking her head out from the upper bunk. Her present state of not-at-all-drowsy told me she was nowhere close to sleeping, just like me.

"I dunno, nothing urgent or she would've called me."

"Wanna spy?"

"How old are you exactly?"

"Says the girl who likes kiddie slides."

We inched towards the balcony above where Will was chatting with her phone in the courtyard. "Yeah she's the wife of... this apocalypse-averting archer guy and ate his eternal life...thing. What? It's hard translating this kind of stuff!"

Long pause. "They're the creators of monogamy, believe it or not. Yeah, and so she gets stuck on the moon with nobody but a bloody rabbit... no, not actually bloody. Sounds kinda familiar if you think about it..."

"The poem basically says, we live at opposite ends of the river, the, erm, Yangtze river, and we drink its water together. ...I agree, it's wanky shit. And it doesn't fit- Well it kind of does. ...How about the Milky Way? ...Ew, don't even go there..."

Naomi turned to me. "Katie calls Will, in the middle of the night, to talk about poetry?"

I shook my head in disbelief and turned to face her, only to find her face inches from mine. All coherent thoughts skedaddled faster than fallen leaves from a hurricane. I stared at her perfect nose, and enticing lips, which were doing the hugely interesting feat of moving and producing sound.

Wait. What?

"What?" I asked, snapping my eyes upwards.

She simply raised an eyebrow. "I said, do you want to want to go Abominable Snowman hunting?"

I blinked. "It's... summer. And hot and shit."

She smirked. "I know, just seeing if you were paying attention, which you weren't. Anyway, do you really want to Hangzhou tomorrow?"

"Why not?"

"Just seems a bit rushed."

"We've got three months to see the fourth biggest country in the world, it's supposed to be rushed."

"Point taken. Where off to after that?"

"First Australia to make some money, then Japan, India, maybe Southeast Asia. You?"

The dark horizon suddenly became very interesting to Naomi. "I didn't mean _that_," she muttered, staring intently into the distance. "That's far, far after..."

Dark, creeping feelings did their dark, creeping thing. "Oh," I realized what it was she wasn't saying. University. Ambition. Future. I suddenly felt a nameless rage flare up. "So what does that make me? Insignificant summer fling?" I heard myself say.

Her head snapped back to me so fast I was surprised it didn't just keep going, which would have been freaky. "No!" she responded loudly. "No, not like that! I just need to sort it out in my head first, it wasn't supposed to be-"

I stood up. "Have you even thought about this? In three months you'll just fuck off to wherever-"

"Goldsmiths," she said in a small voice.

"See, exactly, and what do I do? Go mope in Australia? Miss you in India? Follow you home like a puppy while you get on with your own life? You can't-"

A huge Chinese bloke stuck his head out a window and started yelling at us. Of course we couldn't understand a word but we assumed it was somewhere along the lines of "It's the middle of the fucking night! Keep it the fuck down or" insert random threat here.

"You can't do this!" I continued in a loud whisper, after he was gone. "You can't just go away dumping me after first acting like... Oh."

She looked up at me. I dropped back down to sit back next to her. "So that's why you were... pendulum-y."

"Kinda."

"You mentioned sorting this out?"

"I'm planning to."

"In your head."

"For starters."

"Can you give me a little preview?"

She sighed. "It's not a summer fling, at least I don't think it is. But I really don't want to talk about it right now."

The rational part of my brain kicked in and tried to talk logic with me. We'd known each other for barely two weeks. I had no right to demand her to be my, well, _anything_, much less commitment or the rest of... no, don't even start Emily. So why did it feel like she'd just taken away something big? I sighed, and we both looked up at the sky, although there was nothing there to look at. All reddish fluffy clouds and no stars. Will's voice stated forcefully downstairs, "They're idiots. All of them."

* * *

I stared at the table full of brain-numbingly delicious dishes, a roasted orange fish on an iron plate, small slips of pork fried with pepper slivers, cabbage in opaque soup and various kinds of processed eggs. Even the grey tofu thing that smelled a tad like diapers was awesome. My mood had been shitty all day, but the food was good.

I said to nobody in particular, "This stuff is great," and went back to eating in depressed silence.

Will raised an eyebrow. "Wow, enthusiasm, Ems. Wait till you get to Chengdu to gush, or you'll run out of adjectives."

We'd taken the fast train out of Shanghai, arrived in Hangzhou for a late lunch. Will took us to a beat-up, out-of-the-way place in a rundown alley that made things tasting suspiciously like heaven, and then we visited the spectacularly sumptuous former residence of some Qing Dynasty businessman millionaire guy with a dozen wives.

It was late in the afternoon when we got off the bus at Lingyin Temple, supposedly one of the oldest, richest, most important Buddhist temples in the country. It was another short walk up a slope lined with bamboo, and people were mostly leaving as we bought our tickets and climbed the steps up to the gate.

"Emily," Naomi tried cautiously from behind me. "Can you stop ignoring me?"

"Have you figured it out yet?"

Awkward nothingness as a response.

"Then no," I told her stonily.

"Please?"

I couldn't barely take it, hearing that tone and knew would probably cave if I turned around and looked her in those eyes. So I did the only thing I could - I took off up the stairs.

The first hall was filled with giant golden sculptures and smaller golden sculptures, while the walls were covered with elaborate engravings of mythical creatures and various gods.

Naomi came huffing in after me. "Richest. Really? Can't tell," she panted. So she decided to act like nothing happened? I rolled my eyes and ignored her, ploughing my way through the back, heading towards the second hall, barely pausing to look at the hideous giant figure on my way out. Through a big courtyard lined by trees with a huge cauldron-like round incense burner in the middle, exotic-smelling smoke curling up towards the heavens. Up steps to come face to face with several hundred bronze monks. A bell rung in the distance.

I looked behind me - Naomi was jogging after me, and Will was trailing behind with a _What the fuck is the hurry?_ look on her face. Keep going, said my brain.

I had no idea what I was trying to achieve by escaping. It didn't matter at the moment. Turned the corner and came face to face with a youngish monk in a yellow robe and a mop. It's kind of hard telling the ages of Asian people, but he looked about 16.

"Hi," I said.

He gave me a lopsided grin. "Hi," he responded.

My eyes followed the mop, which was dripping into a puddle at his... trainer clad feet. "You like Nike?" I blurted before I could stop myself.

He seemed to think about it, and spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully. "It not like me," he said finally.

I was dumbstruck. Monks can joke?

"First time?" he asked me.

I nodded.

"Slow down."

I grimaced. "I can't."

He eyed me for a moment, slung the mop carelessly onto a tree, and gestured for me to follow him.

We ducked through a narrow doorway, past a "No visitors beyond this point" notice, through a long corridor and up a flight of stairs. Finally we arrived at what I suppose was our destination, a bell tower looking over everything else in the temple.

"This, a lot," the young monk pointed to the rows of tiled rooftops, "Peace. Take time, experience." He pointed to his wrist, which I noticed had a Casio sports watch strapped to it. "6, close. You leave. No more, ever." He checked to make sure I understood. "Take time," he repeated.

"You love this place," I realized.

"Family rich, super..." he frowned, trying to remember the word. "Super tits?"

I had to repress a smile, since this was clearly one of those heartfelt, baring my soul for all to see conversations. "You mean superstitious."

He nodded, then showed me his palms in a _what's a boy supposed to do_ gesture. "Need money for temple, me unlucky. So every time important. Home. When travel, feel things here." And he pointed to his chest.

We returned to the second hall, where he retrieved his mop, gave me a wave and left. Will and Naomi were nowhere to be found. So I thought about what he'd said, as I trekked through the third hall, taking time, like he'd told me, to take things in. After all, he was right. We'd be leaving in an hour and I'd never be in this place ever again.

Which, as I gazed at the face of a plump Buddha, suddenly applied to something else as well.

"Right," I muttered under my breath. "Fine. You win."

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